Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘He says he doesn’t know how to talk to her.’

  ‘That is stupid too. They spent an afternoon together. He knows how to speak to her by now.’

  ‘He’s worried she’ll have seen too much of him. He’s afraid of boring her.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ she says. ‘But she can always say “No”. She does not have to see him every evening. She’s a big girl.’

  ‘Perhaps she feels she can’t.’

  ‘Aha,’ says Teresa. ‘Because she’s scared of him.’

  ‘Not scared. Obliged, maybe.’

  ‘It is ridiculous,’ says Teresa, lobbing her jeans into the laundry basket as if thereby casting out all thoughts of Gideon.

  He kisses her neck; she puts a palm briefly to his cheek. ‘He asks you to be there, and you say “Yes sir”,’ she tells him.

  ‘If you want me to say “No” tomorrow, I’ll say “No”. It’s not a big deal.’ he says.

  ‘You should do something for yourself, Robert,’ she says, lifting the sheet. ‘This situation is not good. When he does this’ – she raises her chin haughtily and snaps her fingers – ‘you run. You are forty years old. It is not good to be a servant when you are forty.’

  ‘I’m not a servant.’

  ‘You are a servant,’ she states. She kneels on the pillow, facing him. ‘You could be an artist,’ she says, aiming a hand at his drawing of her, on the wall beside the door, urging him to face the evidence.

  ‘I’m not good enough,’ he tells her.

  ‘Yes, you are good. You could be good.’

  ‘Every art school in Europe has students who are better than me.’

  ‘There are worse artists who make a living from their work.’

  ‘I have nothing to say,’ he answers.

  ‘An artist does not have something to say. A writer says something. A painter paints.’

  They’ve had this conversation before; they both know they are quoting themselves. ‘You need drive to make a living from it,’ says Robert, ‘and I don’t have it.’

  ‘He’s made you lose it.’

  ‘I like working for Gideon,’ he says. ‘It’s a good job.’

  ‘It would be better if you did not work for him,’ she says, stroking his back. ‘Think about it, Robert.’

  ‘I have thought about it.’

  ‘Think about it some more. Please.’

  He says he will think about it. They read for a while, then Teresa turns out the light and within a minute she’s asleep.

  6

  6.1

  WHEN ROBERT GOES into the kitchen Renata is there, looking out of the window, earphones plugged in, iPod tucked into the waistband of her pyjamas. The earphones are leaking something he recognises: Marracash, he thinks. It’s a small kitchen; his reflection is on the glass right in front of her; it’s not possible, despite the music, for her to be unaware that he’s behind her, but she does not move. He takes a carton of juice from the fridge; he lets the door close loudly, and still she looks out of the window, from which there’s nothing to see except some sky and the windows of the apartments on the other side of the alley. He puts a glass on the table, fills it, puts the carton back in the fridge. As he’s leaving the kitchen Renata at last turns round; at least she doesn’t feign surprise at seeing him.

  ‘Good morning, Renata,’ he says. ‘How are you?’ The girl has never warmed to him, but occasionally she has seemed to take some pleasure from practising her English with him. Now, leaving the earphones in place, she just raises a thumb, and returns her gaze to the windows across the street. In her hand she has a peeled orange, at which she noisily sucks. ‘Catch you later,’ he says.

  She unplugs one ear. ‘What?’ she asks; the syllable has a transatlantic sound.

  ‘How are you?’ he says.

  Renata shrugs, looking over his shoulder. ‘OK,’ she says.

  ‘Good.’

  She replaces the earpiece, lifts the iPod and starts scrolling.

  ‘See you later,’ he says, raising the glass as if to toast her.

  ‘Yes. For sure. OK. See you,’ she responds, and for an instant a smirk appears.

  Teresa is awake when he returns to the bedroom; she lies curled on her side, eyes closed, with the clock in one hand. ‘You’re up early,’ she murmurs. ‘Renata’s out of bed?’ she asks.

  ‘She is,’ he answers, bending down to kiss her.

  ‘You’re going?’ she asks, opening an eye.

  ‘See you tonight,’ he says, putting on his shoes.

  ‘Have fun,’ she sighs. She raises a hand, takes his, and pulls him onto the bed; she presses her face into his neck, then groans and rolls over. ‘I’m so tired,’ she moans. She’s never a quick starter in the morning, but she is not, he suspects, as drowsy as she’s making out.

  ‘Get up,’ he says, tugging the duvet, and she swats his hand, smiling, eyes shut.

  Two minutes later he’s on Piazza Maggiore, where the sacristan of San Giovanni Battista is positioning a ladder to the side of the door. Above him, an A.C. Milan scarf dangles from the head of the Baptist, and a burst plastic football is stuck behind the kneeling Christ. In the middle of the square, Maurizio Ianni is watching the sacristan’s tentative ascent. ‘The scarf is a nice touch,’ he remarks to Robert. The sacristan, nervous on the upper rungs, extends a hand towards the football; he withdraws it; slow as a slender loris, he raises himself by a rung. ‘Is your visitor enjoying her stay?’ asks Maurizio.

  ‘She is,’ Robert replies.

  Again the sacristan fails to seize the ball. Shaking his head, Maurizio says: ‘You would not think they are related. A different kind of character, no? She is a bit—’ and he brings both fists clenched to his chest, as his face tightens.

  ‘A bit, maybe,’ says Robert.

  ‘I would say she is a lonely person,’ Maurizio goes on; he applauds briefly, the ball having now been extracted.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The lack of agreement makes Maurizio pause for a moment. ‘She could make more of herself,’ he says, then chuckles. ‘Why do English women act as if they are ashamed of their bodies? English style, it is a mystery.’

  ‘We’re a very subtle people, Maurizio,’ says Robert.

  The sacristan, balancing on one foot, moves a hand towards the end of the scarf; the hand comes to a halt a few inches short. ‘The old man’s going to kill himself,’ says Maurizio. Robert jogs towards the ladder, with Maurizio yelling: ‘Hold on! The English are coming!’

  6.2

  A church existed in Castelluccio prior to the tenth century, when the town was destroyed by marauding Hungarians in the course of the war between Berengario I and Adalberto, the Margrave of Tuscany. It is commonly assumed that this church was located on the spot now occupied by San Giovanni Battista, the oldest building in Castelluccio, but all that can be said for certain is that the basilica of San Giovanni Battista stands on the site of earlier structures: excavations of the crypt in the 1980s discovered, at a depth of 85 centimetres, the remains of a brick pavement, which has been dated to the early years of the Ottonian period (936–1056). Beneath the pavement were found portions of cocciopesto, a compound of lime mortar and crushed pottery, much used by the Romans.

  The construction of San Giovanni Battista commenced around 1160, and fragments of ancient buildings were utilised by its builders: the beading around the central door, for example, is almost two thousand years old, and the capitals of the second and third columns on the left side of the nave are Roman too. Progress was not rapid. When the church was consecrated, in 1210, the exterior was completely unadorned. By 1348, when the Black Death ravaged the town, only the lower part of the façade had been completed. It remains unfinished to this day: from the ground to the cornice that traverses the building, the pilasters, walls and arches are patterned with white and black marble; above, and along the sides of the church, the grey stone walls are bare. Between 1500 and 1700 no fewer than fifteen architects submitted plans for the completion
of the façade of San Giovanni Battista, but nothing was added until the early 1880s, when the statues were installed above the doors. Created by the Sienese sculptor Maurizio Puppa, they depict St Mary and St Elizabeth with the infant Jesus and the infant St John (over the left-hand door), the baptism of Christ (central door) and the beheading of St John (the right-hand door).

  The interior has changed little since the thirteenth century. The only significant addition to the original basilica is the Cappella Bonvalori, on the right; it was built in 1470 with money donated by Muzio Bonvalori, who is buried here with several generations of his family, including his parents and grandparents, whose bodies he transferred to San Giovanni Battista from the church of San Lorenzo. The chapel’s altarpiece, The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Zeno, painted by Giovanni di Paolo d’Agnolo in 1472 and poorly restored in the nineteenth century, is the only notable painting in the main body of the church.

  The crypt, below the raised choir and presbytery, is the resting place of Saint Zeno, whose relics lie in the stone sarcophagus beneath the altar. The sarcophagus is a Roman coffin: chisel marks at each end show where carvings have been removed. Fragments of Roman decorative stonework are set into the walls behind the altar.

  A magnificent pulpit, made some time around 1210, is the most notable feature of the raised area. It is thought that the large plates of porphyry that cover two sides of the pulpit were brought back from Constantinople by a Castelluccio man who had fought with the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade. In the sacristy, which is entered from the choir, you can see a sequence of paintings by Girolamo Bonanno. Painted in 1670, the three scenes are: The Miracle of Lodovico di Piero; Saint Zeno Exorcises the Boar; and The Death of Saint Zeno, in which the artist has conflated two different incidents – the city walls and towers are those of Arezzo, but the blood-red stream on the left is the stream below Castelluccio. Bonanno has included a self-portrait in the midst of the crowd of people astonished by the speech of the saint’s severed head – he is the figure in the golden cap, with his hands clasped in prayer.

  Many members of the Campani family are entombed in the right aisle. The most conspicuous monument is that of Pierpaolo Campani (1770–1853), which takes the form of a bust of the deceased on a plinth of Carrara marble; into the plinth is carved a weeping woman, who rests her cheek against the inscription: La moglie e i figli inconsolabili. Pierpaolo’s grandson, Paolo, the last of the Campani, is buried under the slab of black granite that lies beside the third column of the nave.

  6.3

  The Avelignese horse is a very close relative of the Haflinger, which takes its name from the village of Hafling (in Italian, Avelengo), which lies at an altitude of 1,300 metres above sea level, ten kilometres outside the spa town of Merano (in German, Meran), in the province of Bolzano/Bozen, in the Italian region Trentino-Alto Adige, or Südtirol. For a Haflinger or Avelignese to be considered a pure-bred, its ancestry must be traceable to the breed’s foundation stallion, an animal named 249 Folie, which was born in 1874 in Sluderno/Schluderns, seventy kilometres west of Avelengo/Haflinger. The dam of 249 Folie was a native Tyrolean mare, and its sire was a half-Arabian stallion called 133 El-Bedavi XXII, the great-great-grandson of El-Bedavi, an Arab stallion that had been imported for the Hungarian State Stud of Babolna. Prior to the mating of 249 Folie’s parents, however, there was already a strain of Arab blood in the horses of South Tyrol, but there is no agreement as to how this mixture came about. Some have argued that it can be attributed to horses brought to the region by Ostrogoths who settled there in the middle of the sixth century, having been driven north by the Byzantine army. An alternative explanation is that the interbreeding began with a single stallion, given by the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV to his son, Margrave Louis of Brandenburg, on the occasion of the Margrave’s marriage to Princess Margarete Maultasch of the Tyrol in 1342.

  Avelignese horses are not large (13.2–15 hands, 54–60 inches, 140–150 cm; weight 800–1000 pounds, 365–455 kilos) but are muscular and hardy. They are also long-lived, often reaching an age in excess of thirty years. They were originally bred for use in agriculture and as pack horses and are still used for these purposes today, but are also popular for recreation and sport. Descriptions of the breed invariably refer to the good nature of the Avelignese, its adaptability, dependability, tenacity, elegance and energy. The father of 249 Folie was a gold bay stallion, and its dam was a chestnut mare; all pure-bred Avelignese have a chestnut coat, with a pale golden colour being preponderant; the mane and tail are always white or flaxen. The Avelignese is nowadays Italy’s most populous breed of horse.

  6.4

  Gideon’s walk this morning takes him along the periphery of the Senesi farm, and there, under the trees at the bottom of the slope, stand two of the horses. The sight of them is always satisfying: their golden coats, the thick white manes, the stillness of them, their mass. One of them stands in profile with its left forehoof delicately crooked, head erect, immobile. The other, grazing, advances slowly out of the shade, and stops as soon as it has fully entered the sunlight; it continues assiduously to crop the grass, then raises its muzzle from the ground, in a movement of hydraulic smoothness, and turns its head to face the man who is looking at it from the edge of the field. But for a quiver in its hindquarters, the animal is perfectly motionless; it seems to be possessed by a deep and simple thought.

  ‘They are mysterious creatures,’ he had once remarked to Ilaria, as he now recalls. To which she had responded, with the brusqueness of a country girl correcting a fool from the city: ‘They do what you tell them to do. Nothing is happening in their heads. Rocks for brains,’ she said, rapping her brow. And now he sees her beside the horse, clearly enough to draw her. He sees her as he saw her for the first time: the horse in the sunlight is the same horse, with the scar on its pastern. She was in jeans and a filthy red T-shirt, barefoot, brushing the horse’s neck; she noticed him, nodded to him as a busy adult might, and carried on; and he watched her run to the house – a stocky little sprite, outrunning the dog that had joined her. And when he came to paint the group of children, she proved to be – as he believes he had instantly seen she would be – a most unusual child. Five minutes was as long a time as any of the others could manage to pose; it was a game for them, whereas for Ilaria it was not a game, and she would sit for as long as it took. And the way her face changed for the pose was extraordinary – it took on an expression of serious threat, as though in some sort of ritual display; it was not quite play-acting. Shown the finished picture, with the dead horse in their midst, the other children had pulled faces. Not Ilaria: she regarded it gravely, and didn’t speak; her eyes said that she didn’t understand, but would in time, she knew, work it out.

  The vision of Ilaria has gone. He holds out a hand to entice the horse to approach, but it does not move. It lowers its head to the grass, at which moment he sees, on the track beyond the trees, a tractor with her father aboard. ‘Home, boy,’ he whispers to Trim.

  6.5

  Landscape with Dead Horse

  Oil-tempera on canvas; 75cm x 105cm

  2004

  Private Collection, Stuttgart

  The stand of cypress trees in the middle distance of Landscape with Dead Horse is a landmark on the north side of Castelluccio; other components of the territory – such as the profile of Le Cornate – are also clearly identifiable, but they have been combined to form a terrain that exists only in this painting. The figure of the horse, an Avelignese, is derived from a photograph of an animal that had been struck by lightning in Montana, and from studies of the small herd kept at the Senesi farm. An avowed admirer of the work of George Stubbs, Gideon Westfall made hundreds of studies of horses during his years in Italy, filling no fewer than thirty sketchbooks with drawings of them. Horses are present in several other Westfall paintings, such as the first portrait of Jane Jeremies (1994), in which she stands beside Coriolan, her grey Holsteiner, and Grape Harvest (2001), Westfall’s homage to Stubbs
’ The Reapers. The latter, shown at an exhibition in Milan in 2002, prompted a local journalist, in the course of an interview conducted at the private viewing, to observe that whereas horses are to be seen in many of Westfall’s pictures, cars are notably absent, as are lorries, vans, scooters – all forms of motorised transport, in fact. The interviewer found this to be something of an oddity, in the work of a self-professed humanist, because traffic is an ineradicable aspect of human activity, is it not? ‘The car,’ replied the artist ‘is an invention of modernity, whereas the horse has for centuries been a companion to man, a workmate and a rebuke. The horse has been a maker of history.’

  Landscape with Dead Horse was bought in 2004 by a Stuttgart industrialist, a man with a reputation as a collector of German paintings of the 1920s. In correspondence with Gideon Westfall, this collector compared Landscape with Dead Horse with certain works by Franz Radziwill in particular, discerning common qualities of precision, tranquillity and menace. In 2007 the picture was loaned to an exhibition in Koblenz entitled Memento Mori, where it was singled out for praise, not solely for the virtuosity of the brushwork, but for its uncanny atmosphere. The five children seated on a grassy mound at the centre of the painting, facing the viewer with an innocent insolence, seemingly undisturbed by the stiff-legged corpse that lies on its side at the foot of the mound, were thought to be a remarkable invention, as was the scene’s discordant light, with an oily dark sky overhanging a meadow that appears to be lit by a fierce midday sun. Balthus was cited as a forebear.

  It should be noted too that Landscape with Dead Horse is the first picture by Gideon Westfall in which Ilaria Senesi appears: she is the second child from the left, holding the small axe.

  6.6

  They are walking to the car when Gideon suddenly says, two seconds after making a remark on the weather: ‘I do understand, you know. I understand how you’re feeling.’