Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  In his interview with Gary Yerolim, Gideon made reference to the late style of certain old masters, a style in which the experience of a lifetime was distilled into gestures of great boldness. Titian, Matisse and Picasso were cited as exemplars of this ‘supercharged simplicity’, as he termed it. ‘I’m going in the opposite direction,’ he jested. The Falling Boy, he continued, was ‘busier’ than anything he’d produced since he was a very young man. He disclosed that he’d inserted into the painting a sly allusion to his advanced years: the owl in the campanile of the church might be thought of as a reference to Hegel’s owl of Minerva, which ‘spreads its wings only at dusk’. He declined, however, to explicate any of the picture’s other tantalising details, such as the man with the bloody nose, or the small cloud of grey smoke in the alley to the right. When he’d begun work on The Falling Boy, he had thought he was embarking on his ‘summa’, his ‘opus ultimum,’ a synthesis of everything that he had learned in the course of his life as an artist. The finished canvas had fallen short of that, he admitted, but he was satisfied with it.

  Giuliano Lanese, having been invited to view The Falling Boy as soon as it had been completed, pondered the picture in silence for a long time, before pronouncing that it was ‘extremely interesting’. It was somewhat hermetic, he said, but very interesting. He used the word ‘allegory’, to which Gideon, understanding what Lanese was really telling him, took exception. The Falling Boy was not an allegory, he informed the director of the Museo Civico – it was a vision, ‘a lucid dream in paint’, and dreams always resist the sort of analysis that allegory demands. Giuliano Lanese listened, and nodded a lot, as though being persuaded by the point that the painter was making. ‘This has given me much to think about,’ he said.

  Milton Jeremies was no less equivocal. Upon receiving a photograph of The Falling Boy, and a promise of first refusal, he emailed immediately, declaring it ‘a great picture’. Two days later, he emailed: ‘this painting has knocked me sideways – Jane too’. After another week he was ‘unsettled’ by it – which was, he hastened to add, ‘not a bad thing’. Soon he was wondering how it would fit into his collection, and while he was wondering he mentioned The Falling Boy to an aquaintance of his, Dexter Rutherford, founder of Rutherford Solar, manufacturers of photovoltaic systems in Albuquerque, whose collection of visionary art – a collection that included work by James Ensor and Alfred Kubin, to name just two – might, Milton Jeremies ventured to suggest, be a more suitable home for this ‘bizarre and wonderful creation’. It duly came about that Dexter Rutherford bought The Falling Boy, just three weeks before Gideon Westfall died.

  Dexter Rutherford intends to bequeath his collection to the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque; and so The Falling Boy may one day become the first Westfall painting to enter the permanent collection of a public gallery.

  12.10

  ‘You knew nothing about this?’ Claire asks, holding the drawing on her lap.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Robert answers.

  ‘I thought he told you everything.’

  ‘Evidently not.’

  She raises the picture and squints at it, doubtfully.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you think?’ she replies, turning it towards him for another glance as they wait at traffic lights.

  ‘Good,’ he says.

  ‘You think it’s me?’

  ‘It’s not anyone else.’

  ‘I think he’s been kind,’ she says.

  ‘Let’s see again,’ he requests, leaning over. He looks closely at it, but does not look at her. ‘No,’ he states. ‘Don’t agree.’

  A minute later she asks: ‘You really didn’t notice what he was doing?’

  ‘Honestly, I didn’t. He’s very adroit, you know.’

  Another silence; she directs her face towards the pines that line the road. Then she resumes with: ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘Of Gideon?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘But as an artist. What do you really think? You can tell me now. Last chance.’

  ‘He’s a brilliant painter.’

  ‘You’re being slippery again.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he says,

  She gives him a glance of stern admonishment. ‘Do you think he’s a brilliant artist? That was my question. As you know perfectly well. Do you think he’s important?’

  ‘In the great scheme of things, none of us is important.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ she asks, as if having half a mind to be scandalised.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he answers.

  ‘Gosh,’ she says; it takes a few seconds to come to terms with this revelation. ‘OK,’ she continues, ‘do you think anyone will be looking at Gideon’s pictures in a hundred years time?’

  ‘They’re built to last. So – yes, someone will be looking at them.’

  ‘But do you think he will be appreciated a hundred years from now? That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t possibly know. But I think he’ll still have his admirers. Perhaps more than now. Perhaps fewer.’

  ‘And what about you? Do you really like what he does?’

  ‘I work for him, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you do. But does everyone love their work? They don’t. You could like working for him, but still have your doubts. So: do you really like what Gideon does?’

  ‘Some of his pictures are excellent, in my opinion.’

  ‘What about the stone walls?’

  ‘I like them.’

  ‘The cogs and bottles?’

  ‘Not so much.’

  ‘The portraits?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘The naked ladies.’

  ‘But of course,’ he replies.

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ he answers.

  She smiles at his profile, as if she’s uncovered something. ‘OK,’ she says. For several minutes, neither of them speaks. She has the window down, and places her face into the moving air. Then she remarks: ‘He does rather play up the part, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he agrees. ‘He plays it well, though.’

  ‘He does,’ she says, and she turns away again.

  At the airport she tells him to just drop her off – there’s no point in hanging around to watch her queuing at the check-in. He could do with a break, he says; he’ll stretch his legs for a few minutes, then get going. In front of them in the queue there’s a fine-looking Italian woman, over-tanned, athletic, thirty-ish, saying goodbye to a man who is at least fifteen years older; he’s done some complicated things with his hair, to mask the thinning on the crown, and he’s wearing half a bottle of after-shave. They kiss: left cheek, right cheek, then lips, but the movement of her perfectly manicured hand on his back – it flaps softly, rather than presses – tells you everything. Now a family of Brits arrives behind them; between the parents some tension is evident; words of disagreement are spoken, sotto voce; the woman is twitchy, on the alert for queue-jumpers. ‘For God’s sake, relax,’ whispers the husband. The woman drags the kids off to the toilets, and as soon as she’s out of the way the husband takes out his phone and within seconds he’s saying: ‘I tell you, mate, it’s been an absolute fucking nightmare.’

  Claire kneels to open her suitcase and pack the picture in the midst of her clothes. ‘I’m not doing this again,’ says the man on the phone. ‘No fucking way. Not in a million years,’ he says, and Claire angles an ear in his direction and gives Robert a wide-eyed stare of comical amazement.

  The queue has moved one pace in ten minutes. ‘This is silly,’ she says. ‘Don’t stay any longer. Go.’ She stands up. She extends a hand, looks down at it, then takes a small skip forward to give him a moth-weight kiss on the cheek, as if she had just remembered that a kiss is what politeness requires in this country. ‘Thank you for everything,’ she says.

  At the sliding doors he looks back, expec
ting to see her waving, but she’s busy with her bag.

  12.11

  Occasionally, during the drive from the airport back to Castelluccio, a thought of Claire breaks into Robert’s consciousness: her face during the concert, or in the Antica Farmacia, taking issue with Gideon. More frequently, an image of Teresa presents itself: Teresa in the parade; Teresa in bed; Teresa in her office, on the phone, blowing kisses while talking to a client. He sees the face of Renata, regarding him with no affection whatsoever. For much of the drive, however, his mind is registering nothing other than the road.

  At the stand of cypress trees beside the Volterra road, a kilometre to the north of Castelluccio, the road swerves. He stops the car by the trees and gets out. The tips of the cypresses are flexing in the breeze; the air pours through their branches with a sound like fingers stroking paper. This is the place where, in 1603, Giovan Antonio Ridolfi was attacked by a snake. Tommaso Galli liked to read and write in the shade of these very trees. Teresa Campani, during her years of confinement, told her brother Tullio that she often called to mind the day on which the two of them, in a carriage, had seen a doe and her fawn at the cypresses, and had stopped to watch them; she had come to think of it as the happiest day of her life, she said; Tullio, though he had no recollection of any such day, smiled with her at the thought of it.

  I have passed forty, thinks Robert, and have done nothing of any significance. He is, as Teresa would put it, a servant; yet he is not discontented. He is fond of Gideon; he has a good life, a life that many would envy. It is a fine day, he observes. The sunlight flashes across the bright grey walls and russet roofs of Castelluccio; the flag of Saint Zeno wriggles against the complicated sky. And already, he tells himself, that flash of sunlight is a memory; it was becoming a memory in the moment that he perceived it. The present barely exists – it is as tenuous as a membrane between the future and the past: something happens, and instantly it’s gone into the circuitry of the brain, and is of the same substance as a dream. A bird traverses the sky above Castelluccio and flies into his memory, joining the body of Laura Ottaviano, a walk in the mountains with Agnese, the concert at Santa Maria, Teresa dancing.

  The time is 5.45pm and the temperature is 24° Celsius, with fifty per cent humidity; a steady breeze, averaging twelve kilometres per hour, is driving a flock of cumulus clouds eastward.

  The following May, in similar weather, he will again drive from Pisa airport to Castelluccio, this time with Claire. They will talk first about Gideon. She says that she had come to realise that she’d liked him rather more than she’d thought she had at the time. ‘He was unusual,’ she says.

  ‘He was,’ says Robert, a little surprised at the reaction he has to her voice, to the slight creak in it.

  ‘How’s Luisa taken it?’ she asks.

  ‘Distraught,’ he answers.

  ‘And how about you?’ she asks.

  ‘Coping,’ he says.

  She glances at him, nods, and says no more. Her perfume is fresh and slightly smoky, woody, with vetiver in it. ‘That’s not the same one, is it?’ he has to ask. ‘The perfume.’

  ‘Timbuktu,’ she answers. ‘You approve?’ she asks, and for a moment it seems she’s going to lean closer, but she doesn’t.

  ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Expensive?’

  ‘An arm and a leg.’

  ‘You wear it for work?’

  ‘I do.’

  They pass Volterra. She recalls the strange man, and wonders if he is still there.

  ‘We could stop for lunch,’ suggests Robert.

  ‘No,’ she says immediately. ‘Let’s unpack, then eat.’

  Near Cásole d’Elsa I remark: ‘Good to see you again.’

  ‘Pity about the circumstances,’ she says. Then, after a long pause: ‘But ditto.’

  12.12

  Though commonly known as the Italian or Tuscan cypress, the evergreen Cupressus sempervirens is not native to Italy; it is likely that the tree was brought to Tuscany by the Etruscans. There is no agreement as to its place of origin: Greece, Turkey, Crete, Cyprus, Lebanon, Iran and Syria have all been proposed, with most experts favouring Iran and Syria. It takes two forms: fastigiated, which is the tall and slender Tuscan cypress; and horizontal, which is widely believed to be the only form that existed prior to human activity. The so-called Tuscan cypress, in other words, is to be regarded as a cultivar rather than as a subspecies.

  In the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, Ovid relates the tale of a prince named Kyparissos, to whom Apollo, as a token of his love, gave a magnificent stag; Kyparissos lavished great care on the animal, but accidentally killed it with a javelin when the stag was resting in the shade of a forest; in his remorse, Kyparissos pleaded with Apollo to be allowed to grieve for ever, whereupon he was transformed into a cypress, which perpetually weeps tears of sap. The Greeks esteemed the cypress as a tree that was sacred to Hades. The Romans likewise associated it with Pluto, and mourners at funerals carried branches of cypress as a sign of respect; prior to burial, eminent citizens were laid upon a bed of cypress branches. Believing that the fragrant wood had the power to repel evil spirits, the Etruscans planted cypress trees around their burial grounds. In more recent times, cypresses have customarily been planted in cemeteries, to freshen the air and comfort the bereaved with their scent.

  The hard and close-grained wood of Cupressus sempervirens is extremely durable, and has long been used for coffins and sarcophagi. In ancient Egypt, cypress wood was used for mummy cases. The doors of the temple of Diana at Ephesus were made of cypress wood, and Pliny states that these doors were still perfect four centuries after their construction. The statue of Jupiter in the Capitol was carved from cypress wood, and lasted even longer. The doors of the first Basilica of St Peter in Rome were made of the same material, and were said to have served their purpose from the reign of Constantine to the time of Pope Eugenius IV, who was elected to the papacy more than a millennium later.

  The tree reaches a height of 20–25m on average, but considerably taller specimens are numerous: in the Samariá Gorge, on the island of Crete, there are cypresses that have grown to approximately 35m (115ft). Cupressus sempervirens can live to be more than one thousand years old. The cypress at Somma Lombardo, in the province of Varese, was revered as the oldest tree in the world, having been planted, reputedly, during the reign of Julius Caesar. Reaching a height of 36.6m (120ft), it was also the tallest known specimen. Napoleon is said to have diverted the course of a new road in order to preserve it. A storm toppled the Somma Lombardo cypress on September 2nd, 1944, a date recorded on the war memorial in Piazza Scipione; subsequently it was estimated that the tree had been planted around the start of the ninth century.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN BUCKLEY

  THE BIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS LANG

  XERXES

  GHOST MACINDOE

  INVISIBLE

  SO HE TAKES THE DOG

  CONTACT (available as an eBook)

  TELESCOPE (available as an eBook)

  Copyright

  NOSTALGIA BY JONATHAN BUCKLEY

  Published in 2013 by

  Sort Of Books

  PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL

  www.sortof.co.uk

  Copyright © Jonathan Buckley 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  Typeset in Palatino, Syracuse, Seaside Resort and Mostra Nuova to a design by Henry Iles

  448pp.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PRINT ISBN 978–1908745316