Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  He walks across the piazza, past the building with the new brass plate where the one that read Antonio Zappalorto / Studio Dentistico used to be; and for an instant he can see Signora Zappalorto, scurrying towards the door from the Palazzo Comunale.

  6.12

  On the Saturday preceding the 1994 Festa di San Zeno, the Teatro Gaetano was opened in the afternoon for a one-hour guided tour, given by Cinzia Zappalorto, archivist of the Palazzo Comunale. Eight people turned up for the tour: a couple from Rome, both actors, who had just happened to drive into Castelluccio that morning; a Dutch couple, staying at the Ottocento; Monica Nerini, in attendance chiefly to support her friend Cinzia, whose advice ensured the accuracy of the costumes that Monica made each year for the San Zeno pageant; the property agent Gianluigi Tranfaglia and his sister Eliana; and Robert Bancourt, who had been in Castelluccio for a year and was glad of any opportunity to learn more about the town.

  Cinzia Zappalorto welcomed the group at the door of the theatre, and Robert recognised her at once: several times he had seen her crossing the piazza in the evening, scuttling from the Palazzo Comunale, aiming for a door in the corner of the square. Her energy was unusual, as was her appearance: she was a burly little woman, a little over five feet tall, in her late fifties or early sixties, with short grey hair that looked as dense as astrakhan, invariably wearing white tennis shoes and a brightly coloured cardigan, often fuchsia, sky blue or orange.

  The way Cinzia talked was in keeping with what he’d observed of her: she spoke at such speed that he missed much of what she said, but her enthusiasm was irresistible. She led them through the backstage areas, to the room that had been the office of the theatre’s actor-manager, Tommaso Galli, and her voice took on a tone of reverence, as if the obscure Galli had been a figure as important to the history of stagecraft as David Garrick or Henry Irving. Standing on the stage, she directed their attention to the finer points of this masterwork of Andrea Gaetano, an architect so thoroughly forgotten that it was as though he had never existed, as she told them, with the sorrow of a loyal granddaughter. At the conclusion of the tour she told the group that she would be happy to answer any questions. Robert alone stayed, and she gave him another half-hour, clarifying with patience many of the points that his defective Italian had prevented him from fully comprehending. She would gladly have given him even more time if she hadn’t had to get back home to put the finishing touches to her husband’s outfit for the following day’s parade.

  After she had locked up the theatre, they walked together to Piazza Maggiore. It was a great pity, she said, that so few people in Castelluccio – no, not just in Castelluccio, but everywhere – have an interest in anything except what’s happening to them right now. ‘They miss so much,’ she said, with acute dismay, like a conservationist despairing of people’s disregard of their environment. Most of the citizens of Castelluccio, she complained, are content to have just a little bit of history in the air, like a whiff of incense. Jostling against him, with her urgent and bouncy gait, she conjured a stream of smoke in the air with a hand. It was so gratifying to come across someone whose attitude was different, she said. On the piazza she halted abruptly, as if suddenly remembering something she had intended to tell him.

  ‘The dead,’ she pronounced, in the manner of a teacher giving last words of advice to a departing pupil, ‘emit a radiation, and this radiation can be detected if you are receptive. If you are receptive,’ she went on, ‘the world is richer. It is like the change from black and white to colour. This is what I believe. If you are not receptive, you see the way a dog sees. Dogs cannot distinguish between red and orange. They cannot tell the difference between yellow and green. They have a poor sense of space. But if you are receptive you see all the colours. You see in depth. For many people here,’ she said, with a gesture towards the Palazzo Comunale, ‘that building is part of a theatre set in which they live, a piece of furniture. But it is not a piece of furniture. It is a battery – a battery of history.’ She rested a hand on his forearm. ‘But I am peculiar,’ she told him, adopting a doubtful scowl, as though regarding the peculiar person that was herself.

  After this, whenever they passed each other in the street, she would stop to exchange a few words, but there was no conversation of any substance until the following year, when, again on the Saturday preceding the San Zeno festivities, she gave a tour of the Palazzo Comunale, from the prison cells up to the bell-chamber. As before, Monica Nerini was there, this time with her husband in tow; Robert was there; and the party was rounded out by the members of a Swiss string quartet, who were playing three Shostakovich pieces at Santa Maria dei Carmini that evening. And, as before, Robert lingered after the others had left, though this time he didn’t need a recapitulation of points that had passed him by. They sat in the room in which she worked from Monday to Friday, between glass-fronted walnut bookcases that rose from floor to ceiling. On her desk was a square of paper on which was recorded the discovery on Piazza del Mercato, on a June morning in 1619, of a man who had starved to death; ‘his stomach was full of grass,’ read Cinzia, tracing the words with a finger. She showed him a document in which a citizen of Castelluccio denounced Giovan Antonio Ridolfi for breeding serpents in his house. ‘A whole life, and this is all that remains – a denunciation, a scrap of paper, one tiny story. Body and soul boiled down to this one little blob of fact,’ murmured Cinzia, gazing at the pages as if at photographs. She sometimes thought of herself as their life support machine, she told him. ‘Almost gone,’ she whispered, and her finger slid out over the table, flatlining, with one tiny blip at the end.

  Cinzia was perhaps, she admitted, over-attuned to the frequencies of the dead. Often, as she walked through Castelluccio, she could feel the air around her change, its atmosphere thicken. ‘For a moment, I am not in this century,’ she told him, eyes round as an owl’s. ‘I actually see things, sometimes.’ It was, she explained, like an after-image, when you’ve been looking at a picture on your computer screen then you look at a blank sheet of white paper and for an instant the picture is there, grey and watery, but nonetheless there. She had once seen a figure that was the image of Tommaso Galli outside his theatre. It was, she supposed, a form of – ‘what is the word?’ Together they arrived at synaesthesia, sinestesia. They talked for more than an hour.

  In subsequent years, always around the time of the Festa di San Zeno, she led tours of Santa Maria dei Carmini, San Giovanni Battista and, once more, the theatre. She led a walking tour of the whole town. In the ballroom of Palazzo Campani she gave a talk on the Campani family; at the Palazzo Comunale she gave lectures on Giovan Antonio Ridolfi (‘the most interesting man this town has ever produced’), Domenico Vielmi, the Bonvalori family, and, finally, Achille de Marinis, of whom her grandfather had been a friend and supporter. Robert attended all of them, and afterwards they would talk. Nearly twenty people – the largest audience she had ever drawn – heard her lecture on Achille de Marinis; that evening, walking home, she confided that she was about to start working on the life of Teresa Campani. This was their last conversation of any length.

  Antonio Zappalorto, the first time Robert went to see him, informed him, after Robert had told him how much he’d enjoyed Signora Zappalorto’s tour of the theatre, that his wife intended to write a book – an encyclopaedia of Castelluccio – when she retired. ‘Her head is a magnet for facts,’ he said, clamping a fist to his forehead. And, with pride and tenderness, in American-inflected English: ‘My wife is an original person.’

  Antonio was born in a house on Prospect Street, Paterson, New Jersey. His grandfather, a plumber, fearful of his country’s future, had left Italy after the 1924 election, with his wife and two teenaged sons, the elder and smarter of whom, Vicenzo, became a dentist and in 1929 married Louise Brannigan, a secretary at the Grimshaw Brothers mill; the following year a son was born, the first of three, of whom Antonio was the last; all of them followed their father into dentistry. Louise died in 1959; in 1960 her husband retu
rned to Italy, accompanied by Antonio, the only unmarried son, and the one who had always been the keenest audience for his grandparents’ stories about life in the motherland. The brothers stayed in America, where they became, as Antonio would tell you, rich, fat and unhappy; one of them was already divorced when Vicenzo and Antonio left, and would later divorce again; the other stayed miserably married to an alcoholic until he was fifty-five, and found nobody to replace her after they had parted.

  The Castelluccio to which Vicenzo returned was almost unrecognisable: the friends of his youth had changed too much, or had left, or been killed or died. With Antonio he set up a Studio Dentistico on Piazza Maggiore, and they did well; with the techniques they had learned in America, they quickly established a good reputation. But Vicenzo became nostalgic for America. In Castelluccio, he told his son, he felt that he was perpetually in mourning. The town was as uncomfortable as a suit that was too small. He bought a big car and every Saturday and Sunday he would drive for miles, not going anywhere in particular, just driving. He was surrounded by devious people, he complained; in America people were honest and direct. For six months he had a relationship with the widowed daughter of Lino Pacetti, an affair that gave him some pleasure and much more guilt. Eight years after coming home, Vicenzo went back to Paterson.

  Antonio, this time, did not go with him, because Antonio was making money and he liked the pace of life in Castelluccio; and – most importantly – he was now with Cinzia, a woman whose soul, as he told his father, was infused with the spirit of Castelluccio. It had been, he once told Robert, moments before applying the drill to a molar, a genuine case of love at first sight. They had met on a Thursday evening in October, in Via Santa Maria, where Cinzia was standing outside the Cereria, hand braced against the wall, breathing in a way that made Antonio wonder if this young woman might be having an asthma attack. He spoke to her. Nothing was wrong, she told him; she’d picked up a scent of beeswax a moment before, and was trying to get it back. Did he know what this building used to be? No? So she told him, then breathed deeply again. She wasn’t trying to make herself seem interesting, said Antonio. The thing about the beeswax was a simple remark, as you might remark on the scent of a flower. ‘I might come and see you,’ she said, before he had even introduced himself. ‘I have a problem with a tooth,’ she said, opening wide and pointing, like a child. And she did come to see him, the very next day. That evening they went for a walk together. At the war memorial she told him that she had discovered that the Gizzi whose name was carved there was almost certainly descended from a slave who had been owned by the Campani family. Such was Cinzia’s excitement at this news, he felt compelled to kiss her.

  No other man in Castelluccio was much interested in Cinzia, thought Antonio, because they thought she must be a strange kind of young woman to be happy spending all day in dust and piles of old papers. ‘And she was no Sophia Loren, whereas I am a second Mastroianni,’ said Antonio, whose teeth were gleaming but whose face was marred by a nose that would have better suited a head twice the size of his, and whose ears were aligned almost perpendicularly to his skull, so that, as he put it, he had hearing like a bat, as long as the sound was coming from straight ahead. ‘She is an odd one,’ Antonio told him, ‘and we complement each other well. She attends to the past, and I attend to the present and the future. Come the Day of Judgement, all my clients will be offering the Lord the finest smiles that money can buy.’

  They had no children. This was the only misfortune of their lives, said Antonio; it was a major misfortune, but the only one. Cinzia and Antonio were devoted to each other; after they had retired, you never saw one without the other. And after Cinzia died, Antonio visited her at the cemetery every day. In the evenings he often ate at the Antica Farmacia, because he had never learned to cook, and he wanted company, but not for talk. His wife’s sister, who had taught Giacomo and Cecilia Stornello at their scuola elementare, sometimes dined with him, but otherwise he ate alone. He was like a man behind glass, content with the companionship of his thoughts. On evenings when Robert was there with Gideon, he would greet them and exchange inconsequentialities, but he didn’t much care for Gideon, as he once confided to Robert – the painter was too extravagant for his tastes, and he had to say that he didn’t greatly care for the company that Gideon kept, meaning the idiot Pacetti, a man who could never let pass an opportunity to abuse the land of Antonio’s birth.

  At the Antica Farmacia he drank only water and coffee. At home, though, every night, he would drink a bottle of wine because otherwise he could not sleep, as he confessed to Robert one afternoon. ‘I am very tired,’ said Antonio, taking an arm. At night, he said, he often had the same dream: he was in large darkened room and a blind man was in there, with a knife, stalking him; this blind man was death, he knew, and one night death would catch him, and he would die in his sleep. As they were about to part, Antonio told him that Cinzia had amassed a lot of material for her book of Castelluccio, and he didn’t know what he should do with it all. ‘Her sister doesn’t want it. Would you?’ he asked.

  ‘I would be honoured,’ Robert answered, and Antonio pressed his hand, once, very firmly, as if closing a padlock.

  Nine days later, two days before the anniversary of Cinzia’s death, Antonio died in his armchair, holding a lump of chiselled obsidian, which Cinzia believed had belonged to the physician Giovan Antonio Ridolfi.

  7

  7.1

  IT’S CLAIRE’S LAST MORNING in Castelluccio and she’s taking a slow stroll around the town. Off Via dei Falcucci there’s an alley she hasn’t yet walked along; it turns out to be a cul de sac, and as she’s coming back out of it Trim runs up, bringing Gideon in his wake. Waving a hand at head height, Gideon calls out: ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit.’ He points towards the Corso and shouts: ‘We’re going shopping. Care to join the fun?’

  Their destination, at which they arrive within a minute, turns out to be the butcher’s shop. ‘Only be a moment,’ says Gideon. The window is horrible: a skinned animal hangs from a hook, blood dribbling from the tip of its nose, its eyes like buttons of jelly; below it, next to a pile of glands on a bloodied white tray, a vast lump of meat is covered with skin that’s creased like the skin on a day-old cup of coffee. ‘You may prefer to wait outside,’ suggests Gideon, noting, with amusement, her revulsion. She crosses to the other side of the road, while Trim remains at the door, static as a garden ornament. Through the door she sees the butcher – a man of Gideon’s girth, with a corona of snow-white hair – giving her uncle a mighty handshake before handing him a carrier bag, evidently heavy.

  ‘Bones for the hound,’ Gideon explains, turning towards Piazza del Mercato. ‘That’s Marta’s father,’ he goes on. ‘Marta the waitress. I gave him a drawing of Marta so he keeps us supplied with bones. An arrangement that pleases us immensely, does it not?’ he says to Trim, who is walking behind, maintaining a steady distance of a hand’s span between his nose and the bag. ‘And from time to time he lets me work in the back room. Drawing carcasses.’ He gives her a glance to check her reaction, but she presents a bland face. ‘Anatomy – every artist should study anatomy. Human and animal, inside and out. You have to understand what’s under the surface. George Stubbs. You know George Stubbs?’ he asks, knowing full well that she doesn’t. ‘I revere George Stubbs,’ he declares, and he proceeds to tell her about the revered Mr Stubbs and his helper, Mary Spencer, who took dead horses from a local tannery and hung them from the roof-beams of their Lincolnshire farmhouse, so that Mr Stubbs could dissect the flesh and make drawings of each stage of the reduction, until nothing remained but the bones. After eighteen months of work, he had produced the most detailed artistic study of the horse that had ever been created. ‘As great as anything by Leonardo da Vinci,’ Gideon pronounces. ‘He was renowned for his strong stomach,’ he tells her. ‘A high tolerance of unpleasant aromas. He once got hold of a tiger and cut that up as well.’ And at this point a car’s horn stops him short.

  Indig
nant at having been beeped, he swivels to glare at the driver, and his face is instantly transformed. ‘Hello!’ he cries. He waves at the driver, a rather severe woman who gives him a strained smile and raises one hand from the steering wheel in salute; she mouths a word or two, but does not wind down the window. ‘Agnese. A brilliant woman,’ says Gideon, smiling at the car as it leaves them. The precise nature of her brilliance is not disclosed, because it’s more important to be told that the brilliant Agnese was once a girlfriend of Robert’s. To a certain type of Italian woman, a certain type of Englishman is immensely attractive, he informs her, like a zoologist explaining an aspect of the behaviour of his chosen species. ‘The dormant volcano, if you know what I mean,’ he says, with a twitch of an eyebrow. ‘And Robert is an excellent fellow,’ he tells her.

  There follows a digression on the excellence of Robert, a man who has come to know so much about pigments, varnishes, glues and so forth, that the director of the town museum has remarked that Mr Bancourt is as knowledgeable as any restorer in Italy. ‘His very words,’ Gideon tells her, as proud as a father. ‘And of course he’s a whizz with the technology – computers, the infernet and all that. It’s all too much for me, but he takes care of everything. I rely on Robert more than I rely on myself. Everything I’ve ever created is filed away in his head. He has a very retentive memory. I don’t. Mine is quite dreadful,’ he sighs.

  ‘And women do like a man with a good memory,’ she responds.

  He seems to take the remark at face value. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he’s been popular around here, I can tell you. That’s one reason he stays with me. I am, it goes without saying, an exemplary employer. But the women are a factor, without question. Our Robert has a past. Oh yes,’ he tells her, as though she may be in need of discouragement, then he laughs. ‘Whereas I don’t. No past at all, except my work. A man totally devoted to his art,’ he proclaims, lowering his head and putting four fingertips to his breastbone, in a parodic gesture of willing servitude.