Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  Carlo Pacetti’s finest hour as a citizen of Castelluccio, most would agree, came on Tuesday, June 19th, 1995. He was outside the garage, fitting a tyre to a truck, when he saw Franca Alinei walking past with her daughter, four-year-old Marta. No sooner had he taken note of the wickedly attractive Signora Alinei than he observed, by the Porta di Siena, a large mongrel, slack-bellied, scrofulous, underfed. Marta was dragging a wooden duck on a string. This noisy little toy caught the dog’s attention, and Carlo foresaw at once what was about to happen. He dashed from the truck as the dog dashed towards the child, who, turning, saw the dog running at her. Marta leapt to her mother’s side and snatched up the duck; in the same moment the dog snapped at her hand and Carlo arrived. He struck the animal on the jaw, shocking it into releasing the child, but then it went berserk, springing at its assailant and clamping its teeth onto his leg. The battle lasted at least half a minute, until Carlo succeeded in shaking off the dog and planting a swift kick between its hind legs. He required several stitches in a hand and forearm, and many more in his right calf. ‘Wounded at last,’ remarked Maurizio Ianni. ‘Maybe that’ll make him happier.’ And indeed many did observe a slight, albeit temporary, mellowing in Carlo Pacetti, after the incident with the feral dog of the Porta di Siena and the consequent gratitude of Signora Alinei and her family.

  Carlo Pacetti’s wife, who worships at the Redentore, has told Carlo that she will leave him if he ever again addresses a word to Father Fabris. This was after Carlo, drunk, had one evening encountered the priest on Piazza Sant’Agostino and proceeded, within earshot of the drinkers in the bar, to inform him that the history of Christianity was a history of lies, or words to that effect. He compared the philosophies espoused by Father Fabris to those espoused by maestro Westfall, much to the detriment of the former. ‘He loves the world, but you hate it,’ proclaimed Carlo. ‘The artist knows that the spirit and the body cannot be separated,’ he told the priest. The word eunuco was used, at which point one of his cronies intervened.

  The Italian people, Carlo Pacetti will tell you, were until recently a ‘people of the land’; now they are ‘a people of the television set’. He never watches TV, except for the football and Stanlio e Ollio.

  6.8

  At ten o’clock the doorbell rings: two policemen are there; they would like to talk to Mr Westfall. Robert brings them into the studio, introduces them to Gideon, explains that Mr Westfall speaks Italian imperfectly, and offers his services as interpreter. ‘This will be about the picture,’ says Gideon.

  ‘Is it about the painting?’ Robert asks the policemen.

  ‘What painting?’ is the reply, from the younger of the pair.

  ‘The painting that was vandalised,’ says Robert. ‘In the Palazzo Comunale.’

  The younger policemen, a gum-chewer, to whom Gideon has taken an immediate and obvious dislike, says they know nothing about any picture. The missing girl is what they are interested in.

  ‘They are not here about the picture. They want to talk about Ilaria,’ Robert tells Gideon, who rolls his eyes.

  ‘What’s there to talk about? There’s nothing more to say,’ Gideon complains. ‘Don’t these people ever talk to each other?’

  ‘He is at your disposal,’ Robert translates.

  ‘We want to check if you have heard from her,’ says the other policeman, who’s perhaps ten years older than his colleague; he’s the one whom Gideon is addressing.

  ‘If I’d heard from her I would have said so, wouldn’t I? I’m not an idiot. I want her found as much as you,’ answers Gideon.

  Robert: ‘He says that he has heard nothing. If he hears from her, he will report it.’

  ‘But perhaps,’ suggests the gum-chewer, ‘Mr Westfall would not report it if Miss Senesi asked him not to.’

  Robert: ‘He is suggesting that Ilaria might have asked you not to tell anyone.’

  ‘Why would she do that? Why would she ring me rather than her mother? She’d ring her friends for God’s sake, not me. Have they spoken to her friends? Have they talked to that girl – what’s her name – Bernarda? She’s a friend. Have they talked to Marta? Why on earth do they imagine Ilaria would phone me and not anyone else, and ask me to keep it a secret? What’s the logic in that, for Christ’s sake?’

  Robert conveys the essence of this response, and is informed that all of Miss Senesi’s known acquaintances have been interviewed, that none has heard from her, and all have reported that her phone is unobtainable.

  Gideon’s behaviour is not convincing the gum-chewer that he is being wholly co-operative. ‘You saw her on the day before she disappeared,’ he says.

  ‘You know this already,’ answers Gideon. ‘Why do I have to repeat it? Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?’

  Robert: ‘That is true.’

  ‘She said nothing about leaving Castelluccio?’

  ‘Christ Almighty. I’ve already been through this. No, she did not. Not a word. Nothing. Niente.’

  ‘But we have been told that you were intimate,’ says the older policeman.

  ‘It depends what you mean by intimate,’ replies Gideon, which Robert translates precisely.

  ‘Intimate means intimate,’ gum-chewer responds. ‘We all know what intimate means.’

  ‘If this gentleman is telling me that it is rumoured that I was having sexual relations with Miss Senesi, my answer is that I was not. I have made this abundantly clear to his colleagues. Perhaps he should have talked to them before coming here to insult me.’

  Robert: ‘Mr Westfall’s relationship with Ilaria Senesi was entirely professional.’

  Gum-chewer makes a great show of examining his surroundings; his eye alights on a nude study, and another one, and another; a smirk of some scepticism is presented to Gideon.

  ‘I’ll bet that’s what her father told you. It was, wasn’t it?’ says Gideon. ‘It might have crossed your mind that there’s some malice at work there. He doesn’t like me. He didn’t like the fact that his daughter worked for me. As far as I can see, he didn’t approve of much that Ilaria did. As you might have gathered. Or maybe not. It’s a line of inquiry that might be worth following. Rather than pestering me with gossip.’ His indignation is confirming the suspicions of gum-chewer; the colleague, on the other hand, exudes well-practised neutrality.

  Robert: ‘Mr Westfall thinks that Miss Senesi’s father may be the source of the rumour about himself and Miss Senesi. He says that Mr Senesi did not like the fact that his daughter worked for him.’

  ‘We know,’ says the older policeman. He is satisfied, for now; with a nod he signals to his colleague that they should go, but his colleague isn’t leaving before he’s done a little more goading.

  ‘How often did Miss Senesi “work” for you?’ he asks.

  Gideon’s Italian may be poor, but it’s good enough to hear the stress on the verb. ‘Ilaria Senesi removed her clothes for me twice a week, on average,’ he answers.

  Robert: ‘Miss Senesi came here twice a week, on average.’

  Policeman: ‘For many weeks.’

  ‘That is correct,’ replies Gideon.

  ‘That is something unusual. An intimacy, one would say.’

  Gideon hears Robert’s translation; his reply is a disdainful blink.

  Policeman: ‘She was here the day before she disappeared.’

  Again Gideon stares and says nothing; gum-chewer stares back, demanding at least a word.

  ‘I’m not going to repeat myself yet again,’ he says.

  Robert: ‘She was.’

  ‘Miss Senesi took clothes and money with her. She appears to have planned when she would leave. This was not a spontaneous action. And yet, though you have this special relationship, Miss Senesi nevertheless did not give you any clue that she was about to leave her home. She said nothing. This is what you want us to believe?’

  Robert: ‘She gave no indication that she was going to run away?’

  ‘God give me strength. Is this chap being paid by
the sentence? Is there something wrong with his hearing? Does he suffer from short-term amnesia? She said nothing. Shall I write it down for him? Tell him I have work to do, even if he doesn’t.’

  Robert: ‘No. She said nothing.’

  ‘She never said anything about being involved with somebody?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware, there was no boyfriend, if that’s what you mean. Not since that twerp in the alimentari. I assume you’ve talked to him?’

  Robert: ‘No. She mentioned no one.’

  Undeterred, gum-chewer goes on: ‘Miss Senesi came here regularly. Twice a week. So I assume that before she left here on the Monday you made some sort of appointment for later in the week. Is that right?’

  ‘I expected her on the Friday,’ says Gideon.

  ‘But she did not call to say that she could not come?’

  ‘I have not seen her or heard from her since that Monday afternoon. As I have said. Several times. Can you please tell me what is being gained by the prolongation of this discussion, for want of a better word?’

  Robert: ‘She has not called.’

  ‘And when she didn’t turn up, at the time you had arranged, did you try to contact her? I assume it would have been an inconvenience for you. You had “work” to do together. You would have been looking forward to it. You had plans, but then the girl is not here. A small disaster,’ the gum-chewer proposes, miming a man astounded, aggrieved.

  Robert: ‘Did you try to ring her?’

  ‘I did not try to ring her, for the simple reason that I don’t know her number.’

  This answer provokes disbelief, then amusement. Scratching a cheek, the gum-chewer again casts a look at the drawings pinned to the wall; his gaze strikes his colleague, where it lingers for an instant, before passing to Gideon. He smiles broadly. ‘OK’ he says, as if all of his doubts as to Gideon’s innocence have now been eliminated, and he offers a hand to Gideon, as does his partner.

  As he shakes Gideon’s hand, the older policeman says: ‘If you hear anything, speak to us.’

  ‘Certo,’ says Gideon.

  Not until he’s at the top of the stairs, having let his colleague descend first, does the senior policeman say to Robert: ‘We have a sighting of her, by the way. On the Tuesday morning, walking along the road, near San Dalmazio. On her own. Calm.’

  ‘What was that?’ Gideon calls out.

  ‘Ilaria was seen at San Dalmazio. On the Tuesday,’ Robert explains.

  ‘And? Since then?’

  ‘A backpack was found. Yesterday,’ says the policeman.

  ‘They’ve found her bag,’ Robert tells Gideon.

  ‘Where?’ demands Gideon.

  ‘Volterra,’ is the answer.

  ‘And? And?’

  ‘We are investigating,’ says the policeman, hands open to emphasise the obviousness of the answer.

  They are at the bottom of the steps when Gideon shouts: ‘And what are they going to do about my bloody picture? Some bastard walked into the town hall in broad daylight and defaced my work. What’s being done about it? Anything? Have they spoken to Senesi? He was the one who did it. Have they talked to him? Is anyone going to do anything? Eh?’ The rest is mumbling.

  ‘Mr Senesi did not damage the picture. He has not been to the exhibition,’ says the older policeman, in English, before Robert can translate Gideon’s shouting. Giving Robert a smile and a pat on the back, he adds, again in English: ‘We can find the door. Thank you for your assistance.’

  6.9

  Light bangs into her eyes off the hot stone walls; a car turns and its windscreen flashes like a firework. She consults the guidebook: Volterra’s art gallery is a short distance away. She follows a German family into the building and through the first few rooms; they have a guidebook that must be more detailed than hers, because on entering each room they check the page before looking around. She overtakes them and is detained by nothing for more than a minute, until she’s made to stop by a large picture which, she’s gratified to discover from the caption beside it, is the picture that is regarded as the museum’s greatest treasure: the Deposition by Rosso Fiorentino. It’s a weird thing: overcrowded, like a building site, with ladders all over the place and haggard old workmen shouting at each other. The figures are at awkward angles, like puppets – even the clothes look like painted wood. The faces of the women are as hard as masks; the shouting old men, on closer inspection, appear deranged; and the dead Christ appears to have a peculiar smile on his face, as if pleased with the way things are turning out. Everything in the scene seems deliberate, but she doesn’t understand what’s meant, and neither her book nor the caption are of any help. She sits and looks at it for five minutes more; she simply doesn’t get it; for a moment she wishes Gideon were here – he might be able to explain.

  Peckish and thirsty, she decides on a picnic and goes looking for a food shop, which is soon found. The guidebook shows her that if she continues along this road she’ll come to the cliffs, the balze, over which a substantial quantity of Volterra has toppled in the course of the centuries; it’s a remarkable sight, says the guide, which also mentions greenery in that part of town; all the brown stone and brown brick is slightly oppressive, as Gideon had said; she sets off. The cliffs, their clay golden in the sun, are indeed a fine sight, with the yellow-grey hills rippling away below them. Eventually she comes to a grassy avenue flanked by cypress trees, leading to a church; the perfect spot. She eats her sandwich and a peach, and lies down on the grass, amid thousands of pills of sunlight; within a minute she’s asleep.

  When she wakes up, a man is standing near her feet, looking at her as if trying to decipher the inscription on a tombstone. Alarmed, she sits up, putting fingers to her throat; the man steps back, hands raised, palms towards her. A smile breaks in the depths of his beard, which is coal-black, with rivulets of grey in it, and reaches midway down his chest; his hair, grey-streaked black and lank, hangs straight from a central parting and is knitted into the beard; he looks like Rasputin. His shirt, once white, now the colour of an oyster shell, is open to the navel, exposing a pale and bony chest and whorls of damp black hair; the jeans are every shade of grey and blue; on his feet, though, he has a pair of natty lime-green trainers that seem brand new; he is wearing no socks, and his ankles are graphite coloured. He says something she can’t understand and points over her shoulder; the fingernails are black and glossy and pointed, like the claws of a dog. He keeps speaking, softly, as if saddened by what he’s seeing. Then she realises that he’s pointing to the carrier bag, in which a peach is visible. She takes it out and offers it to him; he bends a knee to receive it, like an actor playing a courtier in obeisance to a queen; he takes it as if cradling a bubble in his palm. ‘Grazie,’ he croaks, then he closes his free hand into a fist and makes a small and gentle punching gesture; the meaning of this gesture is obscure. ‘Goodbye,’ he says, pronouncing the English word loudly and with great formality. He walks away, down the middle of the track of grass, holding the fruit to his chest; at the point of disappearing he turns to repeat the soft mid-air punch, and swings an arm slowly to the right, as though to direct her attention towards the church at the end of the avenue.

  And now she remembers coming out of a cinema with her husband, and handing a coin to a young man who looked so emaciated and crazy it seemed likely that he would eat it rather than spend it. That’s all it was, a one-pound coin, but Joe proceeded to give her a lecture on the futility of giving money to beggars: ‘How do you imagine he got where he is? Drugs. And what’s he going to do with the cash? Buy drugs. Complete waste of time.’ And so on and so on. To which she’d replied, she thinks, that it didn’t matter how he got to be there; his life was worse than theirs. ‘And it’ll stay worse, if people like you keep buying his drugs for him.’ And more in that vein, much more. She couldn’t understand at the time why he was so angry; later it became clear that guilt explained it. This is the first time for several days that he has as much as crossed her mind, it occurs to her.<
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  The guidebook says there is one other museum she should not miss: the Etruscan museum. It isn’t thrilling: room after room of funerary urns, most of them indistinguishable from the rest; one of them – the one of which the museum seems proudest – has a sour-faced and boggle-eyed couple on its lid; in another room there’s a skinny figure made of bronze, like a poker with a tiny child’s head on top of it and a dinky little penis stuck on the front. Less than an hour after entering, she’s back outside, in the booming heat. But the drive is again a pleasure: the roads are as quiet as an English countryside Sunday, and Gideon’s old car is like a big canoe on easy water.

  6.10

  The Antica Farmacia is closed on Tuesdays, so tonight they have to make do with La Loggia, the restaurant on Piazza del Mercato. It’s not as good as the Farmacia, Gideon tells her, but it’s tolerable. Because it’s in a prime location, and the decor is faux-antique and cosy, it attracts whatever tourists blow through, he explains, pointing to the window, where a sticker advertises that La Loggia was recommended by an American travel guide three years ago. ‘There won’t be a single Italian eating here tonight, I’ll bet you,’ he says, holding open the door. They enter a room in which all but three of the tables are occupied, and English is the only language to be heard. The room is low-ceilinged, with a terracotta floor and thick beams of black wood overhead, and old prints of Siena on the walls, between small cast-iron sconces for flame-shaped lightbulbs. ‘Fibreglass,’ whispers Gideon, rapping a timber post, smiling at the approaching waitress, whose face is radiant at receiving the celebrity of Castelluccio. Menus clasped to her chest, she awaits his judgement of the relative merits of the tables on offer; he decides in favour of the one that gives a view of the piazza. ‘They seem quiet,’ he says, with an imperfectly discreet nod in the direction of the quartet at the adjacent table.