Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  9.9

  Claire has been to the Biancane, and the springs and fumaroles were indeed worth seeing, as Robert had said they were, but the area was so exposed that an hour in the sun was as much as she could tolerate; and she’d been on the alert for bees all the time, which had detracted a little from the experience. Now she stands on the Corso, in the shadow of the Palazzo Campani, finishing the third bottle of water of the day. The shadows on the street are as stark as shapes painted with tar on chalk; a glass jar on a windowsill in the sun shines like a headlamp. She buys another bottle at the alimentari, from the boy with the blue cast on his leg, who gives her a look that seems to say she’s the most bedraggled specimen he’s had in the shop all day. Her hair feels like a dishcloth; her feet are slithering in her sandals, emitting tiny squeaks as she plods across Piazza Maggiore. The door of San Giovanni Battista is hot, and its paint is peeling in flakes as stiff as the scales of an old pine-cone. She spends five minutes inside, pretending to study the frescoes of Saint Zeno.

  Outside Porta di Santa Maria she sits on a bench in the shade of a chestnut tree. The olive groves on the nearest slope are the colour of aluminium; the fields above are cardboard. There are no birds in the air. A cat slouches across the road and into the shade of a laurel bush; it lies there like a dropped scarf. She sits on the bench in the stupefying heat, until she feels that she cannot stay awake there. Back on Piazza Santa Maria dei Carmini she regards the church, yet again. The statue is of Elijah, she recalls, and his sword is the Word of God. Inside she would see the sculpture that Robert explained to her, but she cannot summon the will to take another look at it. She is about to return to the apartment when she becomes conscious of a whining, a pleasant whining – the sound of a violin. There are two violins, at least, playing in unison, and the music is coming from the side of the church, from beyond the wall with the arch.

  The arch opens onto a cloister, and the musicians are playing in a room on the far side of it. She walks round the cloister, to a point four or five paces from the open door to the room, then she sits on the parapet between two columns. The music stops; the last phrase is repeated, and it flows on, in a quick bantering of instruments. She closes her eyes to listen, resting her head against a column.

  ‘Hello,’ says a man’s voice, a deep voice, with a questioning nuance. A man in black, a priest, is standing beside her, smiling, as if amused to have happened upon a dozing woman here. There is no music.

  ‘I’m sorry. I—’

  ‘Please,’ he says, hand raised. ‘You are welcome.’ The priest has a professorial air: the eyes, very dark, have an incisive gaze, and his hair – greying and wavy and profuse – is swept back from a strong brow. ‘It is a rehearsal,’ he explains, gesturing towards the open door. ‘They are taking a break. But do stay, if you wish.’ Only now does the clarity of his pronunciation strike her as remarkable.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answers at last.

  ‘And how are you?’ he asks, with a solicitousness that surprises her, and seems sincere.

  ‘I am well, thank you,’ she replies.

  ‘You have recovered quickly,’ he says. At her perplexity he smiles again, and gives her a hand. ‘Father Fabris,’ he says. ‘Everything that happens in Castelluccio is known to me.’ There is some self-mockery in the loftiness of the manner.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she says, shaking his hand.

  ‘My informant is Mr Ianni,’ he explains. ‘Mr Bancourt told Mr Ianni and Mr Ianni told me. That is how it works.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Have you been enjoying your stay?’ he enquires; the set of his mouth perhaps betrays some irony, as if what he’s really asking is a question about Gideon.

  ‘Very much,’ she answers.

  A young woman comes out of the room and halts behind Father Fabris. He half-turns to nod to her. ‘You will be coming to the concert?’ he asks Claire, with some suavity. ‘The musicians are excellent,’ he says, indicating the young woman, who dips her head, embarrassed. ‘They will resume in ten minutes,’ he tells Claire, then with a scoop of the hand he invites the young woman to precede him. At the arch she waits for him to catch up; he says something to her, at which she laughs, as if he’s a favourite uncle.

  9.10

  What do we know about Father Luca Fabris? From various sources we know the year of his birth – 1958 – and the place of his birth – Tirli, a village of some three hundred inhabitants, in the municipality of Castiglione della Pescaia, in the province of Grosseto. His father worked on the ferries that shuttle between Piombino and Elba; his mother was a housewife. He has three brothers: the eldest was a talented footballer, was in the squad of the Unione Sportiva Grosseto for a couple of seasons, and now works for a sportswear company; the second is a civil servant in Rome; the third, the youngest, works on the Elba ferries. A sister, Eva, two years younger than Luca, died of meningitis at the age of eight.

  From Patrizia Pacetti, via Carlo Pacetti, we know that the death of Eva Fabris, though the cause of immense grief, was also the occasion of young Luca’s first apprehension of eternal life. He held the hand of his dead sister and knew, as he knew the sun would rise in the morning, that her soul still lived.

  From Cinzia Zappalorto, via Antonio Zappalorto, we know that Luca Fabris had not, prior to this bereavement, been an especially devout boy. In the church of Sant’Andrea in Tirli one can see a rib of the dragon slain by the patron saint of the village, San Guglielmo di Malavalle (d. 1157), otherwise known as St William the Great, the hermit saint of Stabulum Rodis. Every Sunday the Fabris family would pray in the church of Sant’Andrea, and little Luca would gaze at the altar on which were enshrined the relics of San Guglielmo and he would daydream about him, but his daydreams were not of Guglielmo the penitent pilgrim in Jerusalem, nor of Guglielmo the pious solitary of Stabulum Rodis, but of Guglielmo the slayer of dragons, brother in spirit of Orlando, Rinaldo, Tancredi and all the other fabled warriors of romance.

  From Giuliano Lanese we know of another crucial incident in the spiritual development of Luca Fabris. One day, in his fourteenth year, Luca, alone at home, making a model boat from balsa wood, accidentally sliced the thumb of his left hand with a razor blade. He washed the wound, pressed ice on it, bandaged it tightly; the bleeding soon stopped, and young Luca, examining the streak of solidified blood that had closed the cut, and having no understanding of the process by which his flesh had thus healed itself, decided to find out the answer. The process of clotting, he discovered, was a dazzlingly elaborate mechanism of multiple reactions, the removal of any one of which would cause the mechanism to fail. When you cut yourself, Luca learned, a protein called Hageman factor sticks to the surface of the cells around the wound, and sets in motion an amazing cascade of events: Hageman factor and a protein called HMK produce activated Hageman factor, which converts another protein, prekallikrein, to its active form, kallikrein; this kallikrein, with HMK, accelerates the conversion of more Hageman factor to its active form, which in turn combines with HMK to transform a protein called PTA to its active form, which with the activated form of another protein, convertin, works to change yet another protein, Christmas factor, to its active form; activated Christmas factor, together with antihaemophilic factor, converts something known as Stuart factor to its active form, and Stuart factor, combining with accelerin, converts prothrombin to thrombin, which produces fibrin from fibrinogen; and this fibrin forms the clot, which must form quickly, and at precisely the right location, in order to stop the bleeding at the site of the wound and only at the site of the wound, because otherwise the creature’s entire blood system might congeal, and the result would be death. For the young Luca Fabris, this extraordinary biochemical sequence was proof that a Creator was at work, for how else could something so complex, and irreducibly complex, have arisen? Even now, says Giuliano Lanese, Father Fabris can recite the stages of the clotting process in fifteen seconds flat. Science and religion, says Father Fabris, are ‘intellectual cousins’, but if one wan
ts to understand the meaning of things, it is necessary to go beyond science.

  From Fausto Nerini, supplier of stationery to the priest, we know that Luca Fabris was an admirer of Enrico Berlinguer, national secretary of the Partito Comunista Italiano from 1972 until his death in 1984, and that Father Fabris went to Rome for Berlinguer’s funeral, as did Fausto Nerini and more than one million other Italians. Fausto Nerini also reports that in the study of Father Fabris’s house is displayed a picture of Pope John XXIII rather than of the current pontiff. In the course of a conversation with Fausto, Father Fabris let slip a suggestion that he had some misgivings about the doctrine of papal infallibility: the slip was no more than a hesitation and a deflection of his gaze, but a slip it unequivocally was. And he was perfectly unambiguous in his criticism of the intellectual and doctrinal rigidity that, in the analysis of Father Fabris, has gained ascendancy within the Vatican in recent years. ‘There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions, and there will be no peace among the religions without dialogue,’ said Father Fabris. When reference was made to Pope Pius X, that paragon of orthodoxy, Father Fabris, with a hint of disapproval, if not of disdain, described him as ‘the anti-modernist Saint’.

  From the sacristan of the Redentore we know that Luca Fabris was the best tennis player at the Pontificio Collegio Nepomuceno in Rome. The same source informs us that Father Fabris, as a young man, began to write a book about Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), the Servite church reformer, canon lawyer, Venetian patriot, opponent of papal interference in the government of Venice, author of the Istoria del Concilio Tridentino (History of the Council of Trent), and anatomist. Asked by the sacristan what became of this book, Father Fabris replied that he had come to see that it was a project best left to men more able than himself; at a later date he confessed that there were days on which he regretted giving it up.

  From Albert Guldager, via Giuliano Lanese, we know that Father Fabris is highly knowledgeable about modern music, and has a great passion for the work of Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann in particular, a passion shared by Guldager, at whose home Father Fabris has frequently been a guest. Albert Guldager and Father Fabris have on occasion played music together: Father Fabris is an accomplished violinist, Giuliano Lanese says Albert Guldager says. It was Father Fabris who persuaded the composer to write a piece especially for the Festa di San Zeno.

  From Aldo Nerini, via Fausto Nerini, we know that Luca Fabris, as a teenager, was much influenced by a priest from Castiglione della Pescaia, who had lived in India for several years and one day delivered a sermon that took as its text the words of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Father Fabris has described this sermon as the most eloquent speech he has ever heard.

  From Elisabetta Fava, via Gideon, we know that Luca Fabris had a nickname among the seminarians of the Pontificio Collegio Nepomuceno: he was known as il Maomettano (the Mohammedan), because of his ‘lamentable inability’ – to quote Father Fabris himself – to find inspiration in the Eternal City’s multitudinous marvels of painting and sculpture. Visual representation, thought Luca Fabris, is by its nature inadequate to the sacred mysteries: to Luca Fabris’s way of thinking, there was an essential vulgarity, a crudity, an indecency, if you like, to any picturing of the Divine. No painting could ever make him think as words could make him think, because words are the necessary vehicle of true thought. And even thought, mired in subjectivity as it is, can not approach the ultimate truths. Of all the arts, music can best approximate the infinite, in the opinion of Father Fabris.

  From Gideon Westfall we know that Father Fabris, though he generally presents to the world a smiling face, has little sense of humour. This is the conclusion drawn from a number of conversations – none of them lengthy, but none of them providing any evidence to the contrary. For example, after a concert held for the 2007 festival of San Zeno, a concert at which a young cellist from Siena had given a performance of the second and fifth of Bach’s cello suites, Father Fabris, knowing of the artist’s affection for the music of Bach, asked him, as the two men found themselves leaving the former refectory of Santa Maria dei Carmini side by side, what he had thought of the recital. Gideon had not been overly impressed by the cellist: her playing, he said, had been too sombre. Father Fabris, on the contrary, had been deeply moved. Father Fabris had a theory about the cello suites, which he proceeded to explicate as they walked along the Corso: the six suites, he proposed, could be heard as a sequence of devotional meditations – the subject of the second, he suggested, was the Agony in the Garden; that of the fifth, with its bleak Sarabande, might be the Crucifixion. Gideon expressed his doubts: the suites, we shouldn’t forget, have their origins in dance music. And he made what he thought was an inoffensive jest: that he found it unlikely that Christ had ever danced. Father Fabris did not see any humour in the remark; he gave a vinegary little smile, and said his goodnight. Gideon is also of the view that the soul of Father Fabris harbours a little more amour propre than is becoming in a priest. He would direct your attention to the priestly footwear, which is conspicuously expensive and bespeaks a certain vanity; the manicure and haircut likewise.

  From Robert Bancourt we know that Father Fabris finds nothing objectionable in the depiction of the female form, clothed or otherwise, as long as the image is made in a spirit of reverence rather than of concupiscence. The human form, like the form of everything else that lives, is a manifestation of our Creator, and it is right that the artist should offer praise by means of his lesser creation. This observation was made in the course of a conversation that occurred on Piazza del Mercato one Sunday afternoon, an hour or so after the conclusion of midday Mass at the Redentore, a celebration at which Robert had been a spectator for a while, sitting in the nave while the service was being conducted in a side chapel, for a congregation of no more than twenty, of whom none, other than Maurizio Ianni, was under the age of fifty-five. His presence had been noted by the priest. ‘I think this is not the first time,’ Father Fabris remarked, coaxing. It was not the first time: there had been several other Sundays on which Robert had been prompted to sit in the church for a while, to listen to the murmur of the voices, to watch the worshippers as they attended to the perfect performance of Father Fabris. ‘Nostalgia,’ the priest diagnosed, nodding in recognition of this familiar condition. ‘Sometimes it is only sentimentality,’ he said. ‘But sometimes it is a beginning.’

  9.11

  Gideon orders cinghiale, because, as he says, he feels something of a grievance against wild boars this evening. He tells Claire about Trim and the cinghiale’s reeking mud-pool. Claire is too tired to do much more than smile, and Robert is subdued; Gideon can tell that he will have to shoulder the burden of the conversation this evening. When Claire’s attention is caught by the poster for Federico Quattrocchi’s exhibition (Siena, August 2002), he looks where she’s looking, and chuckles.

  Taking the prompt, she asks: ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘You like it?’ he asks, as if he suspects she might.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘I was worried for a moment,’ he sighs, and for the next hour he barely pauses.

  He had met Mr Quattrocchi, at the time of the exhibition, he tells her. An ambitious chap, almost totally lacking in intelligence. ‘Not a meeting of minds, was it, Roberto?’

  ‘It was not,’ Robert confirms.

  Gideon regards the poster: it shows a dirty white canvas, with some dark forms just visible beneath the surface of the white paint. ‘What are these shapes?’ Gideon wonders, in a tone of ponderous enquiry. ‘Are they monsters? Are they our innermost fears? Because this is all about tapping into the unconscious, you see,’ he continues, his features heavy with slow-witted earnestness, his hands making blossoming shapes in the air. But the unconscious is a very dull place, says Gideon. ‘I have no interest in releasing my inner gorilla,’ he tells her. He has a funny story, from h
is time as a student. One afternoon, he’d brought into the studio a reproduction of a painting he had come across in a magazine, by an artist he’d never heard of before: Dieter Müllkasten. Gideon was known as someone who didn’t have much time for abstract painters, but this picture had stopped him in his tracks. He shows Claire the face he had employed in presenting Herr Müllkasten’s work: grave, with a hint of contrition. His fellow students examined the picture: most were impressed, some of them very much so. Similarities with the work of Franz Kline were discerned. But Müllkasten was an invention and his masterpiece was in fact a detail, much magnified, of a painting by Corot. Gideon leans back, arms spread wide to present to her the irrefutable evidence of the collective stupidity against which he was obliged to struggle.

  He has another story, related, even funnier. ‘Ever heard of Pavel Jerdanowitch?’

  Of course she hasn’t heard of Pavel Jerdanowitch.

  Well, Pavel Jerdanowitch appeared on the art scene in the 1920s. Moscow-born, Jerdanowitch had been taken to the USA by his parents, to study at Chicago’s Art Institute. But he had contracted tuberculosis in Chicago, and friends clubbed together to send him to the South Sea Islands, to recover. The natives, inevitably, transformed his world view, and when he returned to the USA he went to live in the Californian desert, where he developed a style of painting to which he gave the name ‘Disumbrationist’. The self-described founder of Disumbrationism exhibited his work in a number of places, and was hailed as a visionary by several critics, notably in various French art magazines. Comte Chabrier, writing in the Revue du Vrai et du Beau (Gideon pronounces the words as if the title in itself guaranteed the absurdity of the contents), acclaimed Jerdanowitch as a man who was not satisfied ‘to follow the beaten paths of art’. This artist, wrote Chabrier, ‘delights in intoxication, and he is a prey to aesthetic agonies which are not experienced without suffering.’ Pavel Jerdanowitch, however, was a fake. The man who said he was Jerdanowitch was in reality Paul Jordan-Smith, a Latin scholar who had never painted anything until an art critic dismissed his wife’s pictures as reactionary nonsense, whereupon Jordan-Smith had set out to prove that self-styled progressive critics were idiots, which his primitivist junk had duly succeeded in doing.