Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  4.10

  Having given up much of the day to the picnic, Gideon needs to do a long shift tonight, and thus, with apologies to Claire, he leaves the Antica Farmacia less than an hour after sitting down. ‘I’ll call for you at the hotel, 12.30,’ he says on leaving, with a grin for the prospect of the pleasure that lies in store for her tomorrow.

  It is, Robert says, an extraordinary occurrence, for Gideon to deviate from his schedule twice in two days. And he cannot recall the last time Gideon asked someone to accompany him on a trip.

  ‘Other than you,’ she replies.

  ‘Well, yes. Not counting me. But that’s business.’

  ‘Always business?’ she asks.

  ‘Nearly always,’ he answers.

  ‘But you’re not just an assistant, are you? You’re friends,’ she says. ‘That’s the impression I get, anyway.’

  ‘Perhaps “companion” rather than “friend”,’ says Robert.

  ‘And is that what he pays you for? To be a companion?’

  ‘No,’ says Robert. ‘I’m paid to be his assistant.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That sounded rude. I was curious about the job description, that’s all.’

  ‘We get along well. It’s become a part of my role, I suppose.’

  She asks him what exactly his role entails, and he explains: he mixes paints, buys materials, prepares canvases, acts as an intermediary with clients, maintains the website, answers emails and letters, pays bills, deals with whatever bureaucracy has to be dealt with, occasionally walks the dog. ‘Thank you,’ he says, as Marta puts the coffees on the table. ‘Anyway,’ he goes on, ‘things are improving, aren’t they? With you and Gideon.’

  ‘He wants me to like him,’ she says. She takes a sip and asks: ‘Does he pay well?’

  ‘Not sure what the going rate might be,’ Robert answers.

  ‘OK. But do you feel you’re decently paid?’ she asks, as if she were a union representative who’s been asked to take up his case.

  ‘Well, I’m still here,’ he answers, then adds: ‘Yes, I’m decently paid. More than decently. He’s a good employer.’

  ‘And is he a good artist, do you think?’ she asks, and it seems to be a plain enquiry, a straightforward question of classification.

  ‘He’s very gifted,’ Robert replies.

  ‘Are you answering the question or avoiding it?’

  ‘I’m not avoiding it. He’s an unusually gifted painter.’

  ‘That’s what you believe?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I believe.’

  ‘It’s an impressive website,’ she tells him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I find it a bit odd.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, the shopfront aspect of it.’

  ‘It’s what you have to do. You can’t sell yourself short in this business.’

  ‘Is that how he sees it? A business?’

  ‘A business is what it is. We have to sell.’

  ‘Van Gogh didn’t sell, did he?’ she points out.

  ‘Name another,’ he challenges. He downs his coffee in one. ‘Gideon can paint anything he sees,’ he goes on. ‘And he’s genuine. He’s an interesting man, and I’m happy to work for him.’

  She stirs and nods, as if provisionally accepting a response that contains a dozen ambiguities, then she tells him that she was five years old before she even knew that her father had a brother. Her grandmother had let the cat out of the bag – she can’t recall precisely the circumstances, but suddenly she knew that she had an uncle, and that the brothers weren’t like other brothers she knew. When she’d asked her father about her uncle he’d said much the same thing – they did not speak to each other, and had not spoken to each other for many years. Some time after this, perhaps a year or two, her mother told her that they had tried to repair bridges, but Gideon wasn’t having it. Uncle and niece came face to face just once, at the funeral of her grandmother. The brothers shook hands outside the church: Gideon was wearing a black hat, and a black cloak that fastened at the throat with a silver chain; each of the brothers, she thought at the time, looked like defeated soldiers, surrendering. Gideon spoke not a word to his niece. He sat on the other side of the aisle, at the near end of the pew, and nodded to her as the coffin went past. They went back to the house and she’d thought Gideon would be there, but he wasn’t, and nobody mentioned him. ‘He didn’t come to my mother’s funeral,’ she tells him. ‘So that was the last I saw of him, until now,’ she concludes, smiling, as if this fact were strange and slightly saddening but of no real importance. ‘Shall we go?’

  They stroll along Corso Diaz and onto Piazza Maggiore, where they see Carlo Pacetti, in conversation with a couple of his pals from the Sant’Agostino bar. Carlo raises a stick in surly salute, as Robert veers right, taking them into the road that separates San Giovanni Battista and the Palazzo Comunale. ‘Gideon’s number one pal,’ says Robert.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Denim shirt guy, with stick.’

  ‘I saw him yesterday,’ she says. ‘He spoke to me. I had no idea what he was saying. Didn’t strike me as the friendliest man in town.’

  Robert laughs at this. The grumpy old man, he tells her, is Carlo Pacetti, formerly the proprietor of the garage by the Porta di Siena, father of the current proprietor. ‘And a great huntsman,’ he goes on. ‘That’s where the boar’s skull came from. A token of the hunter’s esteem.’

  They have arrived at Piazza della Libertà – this is where she saw the old man yesterday, she tells Robert.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he says. He strides over to the monument and beckons her to follow. ‘That’s his grandfather,’ he tells her, indicating the name. ‘And his father was killed by partisans in the last war, so this rankles mightily,’ he says, pointing to the wall plaque that lists the dead of the Second World War, but features no Pacetti.

  He waits while she reads the names. ‘And now I’m going for a swim,’ he says. There’s a pool in a friend’s house, a couple of hundred yards past the walls, he explains; the garden can be seen from the town gate. They cross to the Porta di Massa, where he points towards a lane that slopes away in front of them, under feeble yellow lights. ‘He’s away for the rest of the month and I’ve got a key. So any time you fancy a dip, just say. You’re welcome to use it,’ he says. He can see what she’s thinking, and knows that she’ll decline.

  ‘Thank you for the offer,’ she replies. ‘But I’ll walk for a bit longer.’

  ‘Well, whenever,’ he says. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

  4.11

  She goes out through the gate once Robert is out of sight. There’s a bench against the town wall; she sits there for a while and looks, thought-free, at the night sky. She is in two minds about tomorrow’s excursion. She hears Gideon say ‘The artists I admire’, as if his admiration were some sort of posthumous award. She hears him bickering with Robert, then a vision of Gideon in his ridiculous hat, pontificating, is before her. She gets up, as though to leave him there.

  She walks down the lane, under the yellow lights. A moth as fat as a cotton reel almost collides with her face; bats are dancing between the lamps; it’s so quiet, she can hear the whisper of their wings as they pass overhead. From the other side of a high hedge there comes a quiet and rhythmic splashing. She carries on, down the slope, past the last of the houses. Here the road swerves left; around the corner it levels out and becomes gritty. About a hundred yards away stands another house, with high green gates of solid metal, spotlit. On her right it’s open land, dashed with house lights. Before she reaches the gates she stops to look over the fields. A car is creeping up a slope, perhaps a mile distant; the headlights fade and brighten through the roadside bushes; the sound of the car does not reach her. The flashing light of a plane is moving through the stars. She tries to describe Gideon, then realises what she’s doing: she is addressing an imaginary audience, and that audience is her father. She will never see his face
again, she tells herself, and at this moment the idea is new again. It often comes to her like this. This afternoon it struck her: looking down from the summit of the hill, she had for an instant imagined she would be able to tell him about what she was seeing. It’s like living in a darkened room and whenever her eyes have adjusted to the darkness it deepens again and is wholly black, but her eyes get used to it and she starts to see once more, then the darkness intensifies again and so it goes on. Her situation is ordinary: people outlive their parents, generally. But the idea that she is now doing something that he will never know about is unbearable.

  For many minutes she stands in the road, until a sound brings her back. Behind her, enclosing the garden of the green-gated house, there is a chain-mesh fence, and something is making the mesh vibrate. A scratching noise is coming from the base of the fence, about ten yards off; it could be a dog. She waits, then something dark, half a disc, is waddling across the road, and a rustling sound is coming from it. Cautiously she moves closer: the thing is about to go into the long grass when she sees what it is – a porcupine. The surprise of it makes her smile.

  4.12

  The crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata) is a species of rodent of the Hystricidae family, and is one of eight species of the Hystrix genus of Old World porcupines; it was classified by Linnaeus in 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. Native to North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily and mainland Italy, it is to be found in a variety of habitats, from shrubland and forests to dry rocky areas. It inhabits caves, crevices, holes, or burrows that the animal digs for itself; burrow systems are often extensive, and are typically occupied by an adult male and female plus several offspring. Though it has been widely asserted that Hystrix cristata was introduced into Italy from Africa by the Romans, as a game animal, fossil evidence indicates a presence in Europe in the Upper Pleistocene period.

  An adult crested porcupine weighs 10–30kg (22–66lbs) and is 60–95cm (24–38in) long, excluding the small tail. The head, neck, shoulders, limbs and underside of the body are covered with dark brown or black bristles; the head, nape, and back are also covered with quills; sturdier quills, which can reach a length of some 45cm, grow on the back half of the body. Pliny the Elder and Aristotle both believed that these thicker quills were used as projectiles, and Marco Polo wrote: When hunted with dogs, several of them will gather and huddle close, shooting their quills at the dogs. This notion is fanciful. When disturbed, the porcupine will at first raise its quills to increase its apparent size; it may then stamp its feet – the larger quills, being hollow and thin-walled, produce a hissing rattle when agitated. As a last resort, the animal will charge backwards, to stab its assailants. This tactic has been known to kill lions, hyenas and humans.

  Hystrix cristata is monogamous, nocturnal and mainly herbivorous, with a predilection for roots and tubers, but it will also eat insects and carrion. Though legally protected in Italy since 1974, they are nonetheless often killed by farmers because of the damage the animals can do to cultivated crops. They are sometimes poached for food as well; porcupine meatballs are the most popular dish.

  5

  5.1

  IN THE INTERNET POINT of the Ottocento, preparing for the afternoon, Claire reads an interview with Gideon at www.mastersofthereal.com. I lack the gift of faith, but the spiritual chaos of our time arouses in me a sense of rebellion, she reads. Everywhere I see the triumph of No over Yes, Gideon informs us. He simply wants to show people how to see … only the visual image can do this – words cannot … I do not entirely trust words. He also says that it’s an error to suppose that originality is merely a matter of inspiration, and that he doesn’t suffer for his art – I have no patience with the cult of the suffering artist. I paint. That is my job. I paint what I see. You don’t have to suffer to see and you don’t have to suffer to paint. At www.livingmasters.com he tells an interviewer that the internet is a supernova of drivel … it reduces everything to mere ‘content’ … art, ‘celebrity’ gossip, TV programmes, computer games, football – it’s all of equal value. It’s all just ‘stuff’. She reads that he’s never happy talking about his work, which makes her laugh. I have no time for so-called conceptual art; the concept is where an artist starts, not where he finishes, she reads. And all strong art contains a strong element of the banal.

  The laugh has attracted the attention of Maurizio Ianni, who comes over, his smile charged to the maximum. ‘Good morning,’ he says, adjusting a cuff link as the eyes perform a rapid scan of the computer screen. ‘You are reading about our Mr Westfall?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘It must be interesting, to have an uncle who is so famous.’

  ‘It is,’ she replies.

  People come to see him from all over the world, he tells her; a lot of Americans; last year, a man from Japan and his wife. ‘They stayed here,’ he tells her, as though movie stars were the subject.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  He tries another tack: ‘I heard about the picture,’ he says. ‘It is terrible. Barbaric. The picture is ruined, I was told.’

  ‘Damaged. Not ruined.’

  ‘I heard ruined.’

  ‘No. Robert says he can clean it.’

  ‘It wasn’t—?’ Maurizio mimes a knife-slash; he appears to relish the idea.

  ‘No. Someone wrote on it, that’s all. But Robert can repair it.’

  ‘That is good news,’ says Maurizio.

  ‘It is,’ she says, closing the website.

  ‘I will leave you to your work,’ says Maurizio, with a courtier’s bow. He takes a backward step, then halts, clearly having something to say that can no longer be held back. ‘That perfume,’ he says, jiggling his fingers in mid-air as if dabbling them in a stream of fragrance. ‘It is a personal question, forgive me. But if you don’t mind—’

  ‘Après l’Ondée,’ she tells him.

  ‘I don’t know it. It’s very nice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘Enjoy your day.’

  ‘I will,’ she says, with perhaps too tart a smile.

  She returns to the exhibition, and is the only person there, other than the young man at the entrance, who follows her around, at a distance of six or seven pictures, as if worried that she may whip out a can of spray paint at any moment. She takes a look at the painting of the chapel. The concept is where an artist starts she silently recites, but she’s damned if she could say what the concept of this picture might be – it’s a nice scene, just as these are nice-looking young women, but where’s the concept in finding an attractive girl attractive? Strong art contains a strong element of the banal. Well, she can see the banality all right, but the strength eludes her. She moves along, to the painting of the flight of steps and the arch; this morning she can’t even bring herself to commend the brushwork. The young man is pretending to be fascinated by a drawing. ‘You don’t have to watch me,’ she tells him. ‘I’m harmless.’ He blushes as bright as a radish, but follows her back to the desk, on which there’s a comic book, open at a page that seems to depict a half-naked nun in a gondola.

  She walks along Corso Diaz and turns into Via Ridolfi, for no reason other than that she has not walked down it before; she crosses Via Sant’Agostino, then enters a street called Via dei Tintori. Above a door there is a plaque, badly worn, with a skull and crossed bones above an inscription:

  QUI IL IX GIUGNO DEL MCC[illegible]

  È MORTO ANT[illegible]

  [illegible]ITTIMA DELLA P[illegible].

  A woman’s voice calls out; a dozen doorways along, in front of a curtain of coloured metallic chains, three elderly women are sitting on wicker chairs, peeling vegetables, each with a bowl of water at her feet. The women talk without pause, dropping spirals of white peel into the water; one of the women has a laugh like a wooden rattle; another has an extraordinary nose, like Charles de Gaulle. Six months from now Claire will not be able to recall with any clarity more than three or four of the pictures in Gideon’s exhibitio
n, but the image of the three women with bowls at their feet, though it means nothing, will be almost as clear as it is now.

  5.2

  As implacable as nightfall, the plague descended on Castelluccio a little over a week after it had struck Volterra: on June 9th, 1348, a widow by the name of Antonella Vecchioni, a resident of Via dei Tintori, was found to have died in her bed. Much of her flesh was the colour of charcoal. On June 10th two more blackened corpses were discovered; on June 12th another death was registered; on June 17th the pestilence took no fewer than seven citizens of Castelluccio, one of whom was discovered at daybreak, at his own door, his face on the step as if death had struck him down but moments before he could find refuge. By the first week of July, dozens were dying every day. So numerous were the dead, and so great the terror of contagion, that people died alone, unshriven, with no family to attend them. The dead lay in their beds for days, to be discovered only when the stench reached the street. Many abandoned the town for the countryside, where it seemed for several weeks that every hollow and ditch had a person living in it, like the hermits of the Egyptian desert. Reasoning that separation would increase their chances of survival, husbands abandoned wives and women surrendered their children: every morning an infant would be found at the doors of the Palazzo del Podestà.

  For the first few weeks of the epidemic, many of the sick were taken to the town’s hospital, to be tended by friars from Sant’Agostino. In the latter part of July, when Castelluccio was at its worst extremity, this hospital was closed: most of the friars were now dead, as was the physician who had been employed by the councillors of Castelluccio. The town’s other doctor had departed for his brother’s home on the coast. People who possessed not the slightest particle of medical knowledge had set up stalls in the market, selling cures of no efficacy. One of them was beaten to the brink of death by a citizen who was deranged with grief at the loss of his family. But barely anyone was to be seen in the streets. In some parts of the town, the only living things to be seen in the lanes were animals that had strayed from farms that were now untenanted. One man, venturing from his house, came across a pig that was eating the body of a young woman to whom the man had spoken not two days before. In the graveyards within the walls, bodies had been covered with nothing more than skim of soil; by the end of July these graveyards were full and there were no priests to perform the offices of the dead, so a trench had been dug outside the walls, to which bodies were borne in carts. The dying were pulled from their beds while the last remnant of life was still in them, and left on the threshold for the becchini to carry them away. And the becchini of Castelluccio were monstrous men: they threatened to drag the sick away unless they were paid to leave them be, and demanded favours of womenfolk in return for disposing of their husbands’ remains. At the Porta San Zeno, one of the becchini was stabbed to death by the son of a violated woman.