Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  They have reached the loggia, and he is breathing heavily. ‘Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?’ he asks, lowering himself onto the bench. He tips a thick bone out of the bag for Trim, who withdraws into the shade of the seat; his gnawing makes a noise like small rocks being knocked together. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Gideon resumes, with the air of a man who’s about to disclose a piece of information that will forever change the way she regards him. ‘I have not had a relationship with a woman since I was in my twenties. Absolutely true,’ he insists, as if she were expressing astonishment. ‘No relationships other than friendship, and very few of those. Acquaintances more than friendships. Nothing more than that.’ He is not soliciting sympathy, she’ll say that much for him; it’s more as if he’s reporting a biographical quirk, like never having been on board an aeroplane. ‘I have only one deep attachment,’ he tells her.

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘Well, yes, there’s Robert. But I meant this chap.’ He bends forward to reach under the bench and put a hand on the dog’s head, an action that darkens his face as if he’s being throttled. ‘He is a wonderful animal,’ he says, stroking Trim’s head. ‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ he repeats, sitting up; his eyes have become watery, perhaps with the effort of bending over. He joins his hands over his heart and breathes deeply.

  ‘You OK?’ she asks.

  He takes two or three deep draughts of air. ‘Fine, fine,’ he assures her, then he’s off again, talking about how we could all take a lesson from animals, because animals don’t fret about the past or about the future: ‘They think just enough’, he says.

  ‘We have no idea what they think,’ she says. Gazing fondly down at Trim, Gideon makes no reply. ‘For all we know, Trim really wishes he were a cat.’

  His smile is that of an adult touched by a child’s whimsy. ‘I doubt that,’ he answers. ‘He’s a simple creature. A simple and happy chap,’ he says, stooping again to rub the dog’s brow.

  ‘Happy to be alive.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But cows and pigs aren’t?’

  He looks at her, puzzled, then a smile appears. ‘Have you ever looked a cow in the eye? Nothing there.’

  ‘I disagree. Ever seen what goes on in an abattoir? Ever heard the noise they make? I don’t think they’re having fun. They know what’s happening.’

  ‘You may be right,’ he concedes. ‘But I don’t think a cow is conscious the way a dog is conscious.’

  ‘Conscious is conscious.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘And suffering is suffering.’

  He sits up, flushed puce around the eyes. ‘But we’re built to eat meat. We need it,’ he says, with a suggestion of regret that this should be the case.

  ‘I know some very sporty vegetarians.’

  ‘We have incisors for a reason.’

  ‘We inherited them.’

  ‘Humans are not ruminants.’

  ‘Quite. We can argue and discuss and make decisions. We can decide not be ruled by our teeth.’

  He looks down at the ground, as if considering what she’s said, but he’s not considering it, she can tell. He raises his head and squints at the church tower. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘this is what I need. Some more friction in my life. It would be good for me.’ He shows her a grimace of a smile – an imitation of embarrassment at having confessed to such a lack, she thinks. Again he looks down, then he turns his head to glance up at her and says: ‘You’re very direct.’ It’s a compliment, but she feels as if it’s been imposed on her, like a rubber stamp smacked onto her forehead. ‘I do like that,’ he says. ‘Very much.’

  A wiry little beige dog is crossing the piazza on a pink lead, galloping on tiny legs behind a woman in a searing pink dress and sunglasses that almost entirely cover her cheeks. Abandoning his fragments of bone, Trim trots across the tarmac to sniff at the miniature terrier, whose owner reacts as if the new arrival has brought a stink of sewage with it. A clap of Gideon’s hands brings Trim back immediately.

  ‘Here’s a funny story, starring Trim,’ announces Gideon, and he tells her about the time he took Trim for a dip in the stream one January afternoon, a couple of years ago. They have a routine: Gideon walks up the valley to a particular tree beside the stream and then comes back along the bank, with Trim following in the water. On this occasion Gideon had descended about a hundred metres from the tree when he realised that the dog was no longer with him. He walked back, and saw Trim frisking about at a bend where the stream has cut a metre-high wall in the earth; Trim was splashing around beneath this wall of earth, repeatedly ducking under the surface. And then the dog clambered out of the water, with a bone in its mouth – a human bone, a tibia. The police were on the scene within the hour; a male skeleton was found in the mud, and further excavations unearthed another two. The bones were taken to a lab for analysis. ‘We had a multiple murder on our hands, people thought,’ says gleeful Gideon. ‘Or maybe remains from the war. People went missing in this area and were never found, you know. For a week it was the only topic of conversation. The most exciting thing to have happened around here for decades. Then the verdict from the scientists: no murder to solve; the skeletons had been there for more than five hundred years. Plague victims, probably. Such a disappointment.’ He laughs, then again he’s gulping down the air, hands flattened on his chest.

  ‘You sure you’re all right?’ she asks.

  He nods, tight-lipped. He needs to lose weight, he says. One day soon, if he doesn’t get rid of a few kilos, he’ll have a heart attack. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that a heart attack is what killed her father, and not very long ago. But he does not look good: he’s sweating too much, and his fingers are overfilled. ‘I think we should get you back home,’ she says.

  ‘No need,’ he says. ‘I often get short of breath. I talk too much and I’m too fat. It’ll pass, don’t you worry. I’ll just stay here for a while. You run along.’ He closes his eyes and rests his head on the back of the bench; Trim climbs up, and rests his head on Gideon’s lap; fingering the dog’s fur, Gideon smiles as if dreaming. ‘You run along,’ he tells her. ‘We’re fine,’ he says, looking at her, then he waves to someone behind her – the broken-nosed printer. The man gives her a smile as she crosses his path, then raises his fists, shadow-boxing, which appears to be a greeting for Gideon.

  7.2

  In June 2003 a public meeting was held in Castelluccio’s town hall to discuss a plan, commissioned by the council from architect Vito Monelli, for the conversion of the Teatro Gaetano into a mixed-use building, with a studio for drama and music on the ground floor, restaurant premises above, and a bar with roof terrace at the top. The project was widely approved, most vigorously by Maurizio Ianni, who was no doubt already envisaging his Ristorante Gaetano, its walls adorned with posters of the great Italian stars of stage and screen. But the proposal had one vehement opponent, Fausto Nerini, who condemned it as a ‘fantasy’ that had less chance of being realised than he had of being elected to the papacy. And he was glad that there was no possibility, as he saw it, of raising the necessary money, because the idea of a ‘performance space’ for Castelluccio was absurd. The town was smaller than it had been when the theatre was built – you need an audience to keep a theatre alive, and Castelluccio no longer had an audience. Only a city could keep a theatre alive, because people watch TV nowadays, they don’t go to the theatre. Houses had been demolished to build it, so why couldn’t it be demolished in turn, to build something that has a function? Let’s get rid of the theatre and build a centre for small businesses. Today you can run a successful business with just brains, some phone lines, some computers and a place to put them. And while we’re at it, let’s do something about San Lorenzo – it would make a good sports hall. Face facts: we have too many churches. We don’t need San Lorenzo and we don’t need a theatre. Nostalgia is the only reason for keeping them, and nostalgia will be the death of us, Fausto Nerini concluded, to no applause.

  Over the ce
nturies, Castelluccio has manufactured paper, candles and silk. Wheelwrights and tanners have had workshops here. As recently as the 1980s there was a small company in Via Sant’Agostino that constructed made-to-measure bicycle frames. Now there is only one business within the walls of Castelluccio that could be described as a manufacturer: Nerini, printers and binders, founded in 1930 by Moreno Nerini, grandfather of Fausto, at the address from which the Nerini business still operates, Via del Pozzo 7. Fausto has a single full-time employee, his wife, Monica, who supplements the family’s income by taking in clothes for alteration, as her mother used to do. Monica also makes many of the costumes for the San Zeno parade, in which for several years Fausto has impersonated Muzio Bonvalori, a role allocated to him on the grounds that he is the toughest-looking individual in town.

  Fausto used to be a boxer; indeed, in his late teens, he was one of the half-dozen best teenage lightweights in Tuscany. In 1978 he won six fights and lost none, and his father – though it was understood that Fausto would one day take over the presses – began to entertain the idea that his boy might be able, in the interim, to make a living out of the sport. Then, on the evening of Friday, February 16th, 1979, in Grosseto, he had a fight against an undertrained boy who looked like a muslin sack full of mozzarella, and moved like one too. The first two rounds were won by Fausto with ease. In the third round, assured of victory, with only forty seconds left, Fausto stepped back, dropped his guard and winked at his girlfriend, who was sitting beside his father. His exhausted opponent, humiliated into one last mighty effort, sprang forward with a speed of which Fausto would not have thought him capable, and with all his strength launched a fist into the face of his cocky opponent, cracking his nose and knocking him out for the first and last time. That evening, Fausto was seeing everything in triplicate, through fog. The next day, his right eye was functioning more or less properly; the left, which had taken the full force of the punch, was not. A doctor took a look at him. His advice to Mr Nerini was that another blow of such magnitude could have permanent consequences for his son’s vision. He might be able to fight for many years with no further ill effects; on the other hand, his next fight might blind him. Fausto was prepared to take the risk, but his father was adamant: a blind printer would be of no use to anyone.

  So Fausto retired to his father’s workshop with immediate effect, and after his father’s stroke, fifteen years later, he took it over completely, just as one day Fausto and Monica’s son, Aldo, will take over from them, unless the experience of working in Vietnam – where he’s slaving in an orphanage seven days a week, thanks to the persuasive powers of Father Fabris – turns his head permanently against home. As for their daughter, Alessandra, she doesn’t know what she’ll do with her life, but whatever it is, she’s not going to be doing it in Castelluccio. Aldo will come back, however; they hope.

  Fausto uses letterpresses and litho machines that his father and even his grandfather used, and recently he’s invested in a Xerox digital press, which cost a lot of money but nowadays keeps the business afloat. The Nerini workshop produces posters and flyers for the festival of San Zeno and other events in the area; catalogues, matchbook covers and wine labels; postcards for local churches and museums, and tickets for the Museo Civico; brochures for Maurizio Ianni and menus for the Antica Farmacia and dozens of other restaurants from Volterra to Siena; reports and other documents for the town hall; and stationery for, among others, maestro Westfall, who, in gratitude for the quality of his products, drew the sketch that hangs in the back office, showing Fausto at the old Heidelberg Windmill machine.

  Gideon will be on his way to the Nerini workshop, to collect a ream of monogrammed paper, when he dies.

  7.3

  After the dazzle of the street, the entrance hall of the Museo Civico is so dark that it takes several seconds to see the desk at the end of it, a desk at which sits a pretty young woman, reading a magazine in the breeze of an electric fan. The young woman looks up and regards Claire as if momentarily unable to explain why someone should be standing at the desk, holding out a five-euro note. ‘One?’ she asks, then from an almost empty cash-tray she takes a couple of coins, which she hands to the visitor, with a ticket and two sheets of typescript, stapled together.

  Claire reads: The town Museum is in the Town hospital and orphange (XIV–XV sec.). From the entry of the building you get in through a door which introduces a corridor covered by a voult. In the corridor are displayed: a walnut credenza (seventeenth century), with carved panels depicting the Seven Works of Mercy; a sixteenth-century Madonna and Child, wooden, missing the right hand of the Madonna; and shelves from a pharmacy, dated 1764, laden with ceramic flasks of the same period.

  The next room has a reliquary that once belonged to the church of Santa Maria dei Carmini and another that came from Sant’Agostino; each contains, in a crystal phial encased within a gilded sunburst, what appears to be a sliver of bone, but the guide doesn’t specify whose bones they might have been. A second vitrine is occupied by a miscellany of tarnished metallic items and terracotta fragments, none of them labelled. Domestic use objects, of Etruscan and Roman ages, says the guide.

  The paintings are in the third room. On the left are hung a Madonna with Child (XV sec.), a Madonna with Child in throne (XVI sec.), Saint Francis receiving the stimmates (XV sec.), Saint Francis preaches to the birds by Il Beccafico (c. 1460), and a flaking little picture that has been identified with some doubts as a portrait of the son of Bartolo di Tura Bandini (1391–1477), famed phisician of the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala. Opposite, there is a wormhole-ridden panel of wood that appears to show a man hugging a small cloud, which illustrates an episode of a folkloristic story. The cloud picture used to belong to the emminent Campani family, some of whom – Pierpaolo and Giuditta, with Anna Maria, Chiara, Teresa, Michele, Paolo and Tullio – are depicted in the painting alongside.

  In the centre of the room, a steel frame supports a masterpiece by Giovanni di Paolo d’Agnolo (c.1409–c.1480). Created for the private chapel of Muzio Bonvalori in the Rocca Nuova, it rappresents S. Bernardino who preaches to the contempt of terrestial things and stamps onto the mitries, symbols that he refuses the ecclesiastical power. In it, the emaciated and marble-eyed saint aims a blazing golden plate, bearing the letters IHS, at a crowd of finely dressed folk, all kneeling; directly above the saint’s head, at an altitude of approximately twenty feet, a crown is supported by a pair of angels. Visitors are instructed to note the vivacity of colours and the particular of the characters. One of these characters, she reads, is Muzio Bonvalori, whose shield, adorned with his coat of arms, lies on the ground beside him.

  Propped on an easel in a corner of the last room is a portrait – an eighteenth-century copy of a lost original – of Giovan Antonio Ridolfi (b. Pisa, 1570; d. Castelluccio, 1636); the cheeks appear to have been rouged and the mouth enhanced with lipstick; he has the look of a man who has been embalmed and is not at all pleased by the liberties that have been taken with his body; for some reason he is holding a sprig of oak leaves. To the side of the picture, a caption describes Giovan Antonio Ridolfi as a man of great learning whose home was filled with items of zoological and botanical interest, and objects of curiosity. Two of these objects are on show, under the gaze of their former owner. The first is a cherry stone, mounted like a jewel between silver curlicues with a pendant pearl; no fewer than thirty-five cherubic faces have been carved onto the stone, as one can verify with the aid of the lens that has been suspended in front of it. Having counted the thirty-five faces, Claire crosses the room to inspect the second object of curiosity. No more than eight inches tall, it consists of a corkscrew pedestal that supports a perforated sphere, in which nestles a dodecahedron, also perforated, which in turn encloses a small hollow hexahedron, which contains a tiny sphere of solid ivory. The whole thing, the pamphlet informs her, was carved from a single piece of ivory, by the famous Manfredo Settala of Milan (1600–1680), whose museum, comprising around 3,000 items, included coi
ns, minerals, articles of Africa and the Americas, and scientific instruments builded by Settala himself. The thing is astonishing: the carving of it would have required the fingers of a brain surgeon and the patience of a monk. A ball inside a polyhedron inside another polyhedron inside a sphere – she can’t imagine how it could have been done. And she can’t imagine what its purpose might have been – merely to amaze? Already her amazement is dwindling. It must have meant something more than would a model of the Empire State Building made out of toothpicks, mustn’t it? But what did it mean? The text in her hand says only that Settala was a master of the art of ivory carving, and that this art was practised by no other than Rudolph II.

  One final section remains: a wall hung with ex-votoes for Saint Zeno, painted on bits of wood by grateful recipients of his supernatural aid. Various accidents are depicted, but the pictures are identical in one respect: in each scene the saint appears in the top right-hand corner, standing on a puff of cloud. Sometimes he’s shown with a boar kneeling at his feet, and sometimes he’s shown twice: on his cloud, and at the scene of the mishap. In one picture he’s in mid-air, with arms outstretched like a diver, descending to the aid of a fat little chap who is floating facedown in a river, as plump as a beach ball. The saint supports the head of a bloodied man who lies supine behind a rearing horse; he hauls a child out of a well; he places a bale of hay beneath a toppling ladder; he causes the knife of a would-be murderer to splinter against the torso of the intended victim. Painted between 1700 and 1900, the ex-votoes are fasinating examples of the folk art. She goes back for another look at Settala’s ivory puzzle; the amazement has gone entirely; she can get nothing more from the Museo Civico.