Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  She had been working with Gideon for nine months when she embarked on a relationship with his assistant. ‘But nobody would ever mistake Robert for a footballer,’ Gideon remarked, on the morning his suspicions were confirmed, and Laura laughed; her laugh was strangely ingenuous. It was true, she had to agree: Robert wouldn’t last two minutes at the San Siro; on the other hand, he wasn’t stupid, and that counted for a lot. It took her less than a month to discover that, disappointingly, Robert in fact was yet another of those men whose gaze cannot penetrate the skin. And Robert, after almost four weeks of Laura, was not inclined to rebut the charge, however inappropriate it might have been. ‘What did you find to talk about?’ Gideon enquired, incredulous. ‘Until last week there wasn’t a great deal of talking,’ was the answer.

  Earlier that day Laura had informed Gideon that it would no longer be possible to continue to come to his studio. She preferred to say no more, and Gideon was happy to respect her discretion: he accepted her resignation with a regret that was not wholly for form’s sake – Laura had proved to be, after all, a lucrative subject. He was, however, not entirely happy with any of his paintings of her: they had a certain inertness; they were too decorous; there was a whiff of the academy about some of them, which was perhaps to be expected when the model was a young woman as conventional as Laura. Nevertheless, he decided to complete the painting that had been interrupted by her departure, even though it had barely advanced beyond tracing on the canvas; it was finished by using sketches he had made in the preceding months – the only instance in which he produced a figure painting in the absence of the model. This was Nude 115, which was bought by a Russian businessman who had previously bought Nude 111, another image of Laura Ottaviano. His wife was jealous, reported this aficionado of the feminine, but she had to admit that ‘this young lady is very special’. He had, he informed the artist, a ‘gallery of beauties’ in his apartment in St Petersburg, and for purposes of documentation he would like to have some information about the ‘lady depicted with such art’; Gideon provided none. In addition to his gallery of beauties, the Russian owned a Fabergé egg, and his great ambition in life, his ‘Holy Grail’, he confessed, was to find one of the missing eight ‘Marie’ eggs. Many Renaissance princes, Gideon had to remind himself, were terrible vulgarians too.

  10.5

  After a hasty meal at the Antica Farmacia, they arrive at the former refectory of the convent of Santa Maria dei Carmini less than five minutes before the start of the concert, but there are several unoccupied seats, most of them close to the front. Gideon does not want to sit at the front: musicians should be heard and not seen, he says, directing Claire into a row near the back. The acoustics are better here, he says; the sound is more balanced. His arrival has been noted: people nod to him, and a man she’s never seen before reaches back to shake his hand. ‘Maestro,’ says the man, and Gideon smiles in acceptance of the tribute. A woman taps Gideon on the shoulder; she is enthusing about the exhibition, Robert explains; Gideon’s mouth twitches with self-deprecation; you can almost hear him purr.

  On each seat there’s a programme, a single sheet of paper, listing the works to be played and the names of the musicians, above adverts for La Cereria, the Ottocento hotel and a restaurant in Mensano. On the reverse are three paragraphs – Italian, German, English – about the music of Albert Guldager. The first sentence informs the reader that La luna, quasi a mezza notte tarda was ‘inspired by the local legend of Mad Ginevra, though in no way a representation of the story’, and is dedicated to Father Luca Fabris, from whom the composer first heard the tale. Thereafter, the text becomes more opaque. Perusing it, Gideon begins to mutter. ‘What is this tripe?’ he asks nobody in particular. Then, to Robert: ‘Have you read this? “Evaporation into nothingness … blah blah blah … a paradise of glaciers.” What in God’s name is this supposed to mean? “Time is here a point, not a line. There is no before and after.” Drivel. Utter gibberish. What’s the Italian like?’

  Robert scans the Italian paragraph. ‘No better,’ he answers. The musicians – three young women – are emerging from a doorway in the end wall. A spatter of applause greets them.

  Gideon, as if hearing nothing, continues to read. ‘Jesus,’ he murmurs. ‘How could anyone write this guff? “The body of sound is opened by Guldager’s scalpel of micro-intervals.” Any idea what that might mean?’ he enquires.

  ‘We’ll find out in a while, Gideon,’ Robert tells him.

  The musicians are tuning their instruments. Clutching the sheet of paper, Gideon looks around the room as though trying to locate the person responsible for the nonsense he’s had to read. He’s still indignant when the musicians begin, with a trio by Boccherini, but the scowl dissolves quickly, and by the second movement he is, apparently, in a state of bliss.

  Claire, by the third movement, is keen for this particular item to end: it’s pleasant enough, but it sounds like background music – she imagines lords and ladies, bewigged, playing cards in candlit rooms, with the fiddlers at work in an alcove. The second piece on the menu, by someone called Felice Giardini (1716–1796), is not dissimilar. She finds herself, for all her efforts to concentrate, glancing to left and right. Several faces are façades of attention, with tedium visible through the eyes. Gideon, however, appears rapt: he smiles as though the three musicians had been nurtured by him and were acquitting themselves brilliantly. For Claire, the demeanours of the young women are the principal diversion: the cellist is all blithe virtuosity, her expression nonchalant throughout; the violinist stares at the score on her music stand, with a concentration that is almost fearful; the eyes of the viola player – the young woman she saw with the priest – keep flickering to the side, as though she’s taking prompts from an invisible tutor. They are, as far as she can judge, a very well-drilled trio.

  As soon as the last note of Giardini’s composition has died, Gideon exclaims: ‘Bravo’. Others follow suit. ‘Terrific stuff, eh?’ he says to Claire, with a passion that cannot be countered.

  Next come two études by Albert Guldager. The first, for cello, commences with a sprightly phrase that might have been taken from one of the trios they’ve just heard, but then the music disintegrates into a sequence of gestures, of squiggles and scrapings and pluckings and brief catches of melody, or the beginnings of melodies, becoming quieter and quieter in the course of its six or seven minutes, until finally there’s nothing more than a tentative scribbling on one string. The response to Guldager’s étude for violin is cautious, and the applause is done in twenty seconds; Gideon’s hands remain locked in his lap. The violin étude, after a bar or two of old-fashioned tunefulness, is similarly strange, if more abrasive: glaring at the score, the violinist hacks at the strings; she makes them screech and wail and moan; a crescendo of ascending spirals is succeeded by spirals descending towards silence.

  Robert glances at Gideon, who is examining the ceiling, and at Claire, who has a slight frown, as if experiencing a sensation, like a low-voltage electric shock, that may or may not be enjoyable. Now every note is at the instrument’s upper limit, like an electric whispering; then there’s a long slow slide, down to the lowest reach, and the piece is finished. The violinist, smiling with the satisfaction of having overcome the music, puts a hand out and Albert Guldager rises from the front row to take it. He bows, before standing aside to direct his applause at the performer; about two-thirds of the audience follow his lead.

  Gideon waits for a minute before remarking, out of the side of his mouth: ‘Sometimes, you know, less really is less.’

  This, it seems to Claire, is probably not the first time this joke has been aired. ‘I liked it,’ she says.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ Gideon tells her.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Really?’ he says, as if she’d just said that she likes to eat frog spawn.

  ‘I wasn’t the only one,’ she says. ‘They did, definitely,’ pointing to a small cluster of enthusiastic applauders, Mr Lanese among them.

&nbs
p; ‘They are pretending, believe me,’ says Gideon. ‘Never underestimate the fear of appearing stupid.’

  ‘Well, I thought it was interesting,’ says Claire. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  ‘We’re agreed on that,’ says Gideon. ‘I’ve never heard a monkey running over a keyboard either, but that doesn’t mean that a monkey running over a keyboard would be an event of any significance.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was of any significance,’ answers Claire, calmly obdurate. ‘I’m saying that I liked it.’

  Gideon looks into her eyes, to ascertain if this is a disagreement that has any foundation other than a compulsion to disagree with him. Appearing to achieve no conclusion, he continues: ‘There was no reason for any of it. Noodling, that’s all it was. Pseudo-clever noodling. It began in the middle of nowhere and finished in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘But a different nowhere,’ Robert suggests.

  ‘It could have gone on for twice as long or half as long and it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference.’

  ‘Yes it would,’ says Robert. ‘It would have been half the length or twice the length.’

  ‘And just as pointless,’ Gideon responds, scanning the programme.

  ‘Robert, what did you think?’ asks Claire.

  ‘I’m staying for part two.’

  Claire directs at Gideon an amiable smile of triumph, but he doesn’t see it. ‘”We do not think of the music’s architecture – its sounds are constellations, disconnected yet of a oneness”,’ he recites. ‘The composer’s own words,’ he informs them, like a prosecutor leaving the jury to draw its own conclusions from the defendant’s incoherence. ‘I’m off. Enjoy the noodling.’

  ‘Gideon,’ Robert protests. ‘Stay. You’ve got another dose of Corelli afterwards.’ The tone is what you might use in trying to persuade an obstreperous teenager.

  ‘They’ve put the Corelli at the end to stop people buggering off after the interval,’ answers Gideon. ‘But in this case the bait is insufficient. Buona notte tutti.’ He tiptoes out, aping the crouching hurry of a man regrettably called away.

  The violinist comes out, on her own, to make an announcement, which Robert translates: for this performance of La luna, quasi a mezza notte tarda, the very first, the main doors of the hall and the windows are to be opened, as requested by the composer; she makes a respectful gesture towards the front row. As the doors and windows are being opened, the musicians take their places.

  The tam-tam player, wielding a club with a massive head of dense white fluff, strikes the soft initial note, which is allowed to expire into silence – or near-silence, because inside it there’s the whine of a scooter, two or three streets away. Again the percussionist caresses the metal, with slightly greater force, and the bassoonist makes a sound like a quiet snore. Next the saxophone joins in, contributing a sigh, and the violinist taps the wood of her instrument with her fingernails, as if sending a message in Morse code. Sequences of slowly rising tones, separated by silences, come from the flute; they suggest to Claire an image of bubbles rising through oil. It’s all strange: the cellist swipes the strings with the pads of her fingers, before bouncing the bow off the strings; the flautist exhales exhaustedly, and a moment later is blowing as if firing a dart from a blowpipe; the violinist generates a noise like a bee swarm; the saxophone murmurs like a dove; violin and cello together make a soft hissing and clatter, not unlike the sound of the porcupine’s quills. In one of the silences she hears an owl, a real owl, far off; a car door closes with a thump; the percussionist, putting a hand to the back of the tam-tam, makes a similar thump. When it ends – with flute and saxophone and violin adding tiny squeaks and squeals to the slow-dying boom of the tam-tam – she’s not sure if the last sound, a barely audible scrape, has come from the musicians or the audience or the piazza. For fully fifteen seconds the musicians remain motionless, with bow to strings and mouth to mouthpiece, making not a sound. They relax at last; Guldager takes another bow, modestly; he shakes the hand of Father Fabris, who is seated in the front row; half a minute after rising, the composer is back in his seat; the applause stops almost at once.

  10.6

  One day in the year 1245 or 1246, a man known to us only by the name of Michele, a pedlar of knives and pots and other items of metalwork, approached Castelluccio from the direction of Volterra. He had come to the town for its weekly market, and was accompanied by his son, Luca, who was fifteen years of age, and his daughter, Ginevra, a year younger. They were within sight of the town when a pack of dogs came howling through a field of wheat beside the road and leapt upon the family. Fighting furiously with knives and axes, Michele and his children succeeded in putting the animals to flight, but all three were bitten in the struggle. At the stream outside Castelluccio the father washed the blood from their wounds. The injuries were numerous and painful, but none was grave, or so it appeared. Michele dressed the cuts with herbs and closed them with bandages of sacking, then he led Luca and Ginevra to the market place, where they remained until late into the afternoon. They slept that night in a granary.

  In the morning Ginevra had not enough strength to raise herself from the ground and her eyes could not tolerate the light of day. Her skin was as hot as a piece of metal that has been under the summer’s sun for many hours, and there was foam in her mouth. By sunset she was dead. Ginevra was buried in a shallow grave outside the walls. Later the same day, Michele and Luca set off along the road to Massa.

  On the following Sunday, as the moment came for the elevation of the Host in the church of San Giovanni Battista, a most extraordinary incident occurred. A cry from the rear of the church made the priest pause. He looked towards the door, which had come open. There, on a track of sunlight, stood Ginevra, the pedlar’s daughter. Worms writhed in her hair; her shroud was torn and muddied; as she approached the altar, serenely as a bride, crumbs of soil were scattered behind her; she exuded a sweet stink of corruption. She spoke: which was the man, she enquired, who had consigned her body to the earth? The question was put gently, as if she were requesting a cup of water. The priest stepped down from the altar, and stated that he had conducted the burial. Ginevra moved towards him; at arm’s length, she stopped; she bowed her head; she raised her arms, on which the wounds were turning green; she placed her hands on the priest’s shoulders, drew him closer, and kissed him, softly, on each cheek. That done, she raised her face. Tears were streaking from her eyes, yet she was smiling. In a voice so quiet that few but the priest could hear her, she said to him: ‘Jesus Christ is not our saviour.’ In the next instant she collapsed, falling so suddenly it was as though she had been struck dead for her blasphemy. But she breathed as she lay on the floor in front of the altar, and one of the worshippers – a widow – stepped forward to request of the priest that the girl should be carried to her house.

  For a week the widow and her sister tended Ginevra. They bathed her every day; they dressed her wounds freshly every morning; they fed her and they talked to her, but she spoke little, except to murmur, again and again, that she had seen things that would make anyone marvel. What these things were, she did not yet say. She slept for many hours, and began to recover her health. She was calm, and courteous, and grateful for what had been done for her.

  News of her resurrection had been conveyed to her father and brother, who duly came back to Castelluccio. Michele entered the room in which his daughter was sleeping, and waited for her to awake. When at last her eyes opened, the look they gave him was strange. She smiled, but it was as if, instead of seeing her father at her bedside, she was looking upon an image that had given rise to tender memories of him. They embraced, and then she told him that because of what had happened to her she could no longer be his daughter. Like the blessed Chiara, she told him, she must renounce all possessions and family. She revealed to him what she had so far revealed to nobody: what her soul had experienced in the hours in which her body had been lying in the grave.

  She had, she said, journ
eyed to the domain of the dead. It was a plain of perfect flatness that had no end to it, and the dead were going about in a violet twilight that never changed. And everyone who had ever died was there, the sinful and the good, all together. Charlemagne was there, and all the Caesars of Rome. The popes were there, every one of them, with Saint Peter and John the Baptist and all of the Apostles. She had seen so many of the holy martyrs, and so many evil men – she had seen Nero and Herod and even Judas himself, and he was not in torment. Nobody was in torment and nobody was in bliss. Noah and Moses and the Queen of Sheba – she had seen them all, everybody who has ever lived, and though there were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them she could see them all so clearly, it was as if her sight could fly over any distance and lose none of its strength. She closed her eyes and smiled, and seemed to be seeing once more that infinite plain of the dead.

  For a full day Michele reasoned with his daughter, but she was immovable: she could not go with him. So, as soon as Ginevra’s body had recovered, Michele bound her wrists with twine and placed a halter around her neck, and he led her back to Volterra. She submitted to capture, and followed her father as meekly as a calf following its mother. But on the second night she escaped from him. Two days later, she reappeared in Castelluccio.

  She begged in the streets of the town, and in return for alms she would tell her benefactors what she had seen when she had been dead. ‘We must live, we must live,’ she would repeat, as if she had discovered a wonderful secret. Pitying the mad girl, many people gave her food and drink. A carpenter built a hut for her, against the town wall, near the Porta di Volterra. Some days she would walk through the streets from dawn to dusk, singing songs that were inaudible or made little sense. Her walk – erect, dignified, slow – at times made it seem that she was following a sacred procession that was invisible to everyone but her. Sometimes she would pass through one of the town gates at first light and re-enter many hours later, having walked the hills all day long, circling Castelluccio again and again, without pause; she could be seen in the distance, crossing the fields with her steady tread. The townsfolk feared for the girl, but no mischance ever befell her. ‘No misfortune can harm me,’ she would tell them, ‘because I have been dead.’ Every day she would bathe in the stream, and it did not concern her that she might be seen. A priest remonstrated with her, upbraiding her for immodesty. She rebuked him for his lechery.