I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  The restaurant was splendidly sited on the far end of the enormous rock supporting the castle and offered an unequalled prospect of the slightly unearthly landscape I had viewed in part through the narrow windows of the castle itself. Bronzed and burnished autumn fields had been flung over the low hills in a way that identified this as Etruscan country. Sharp-edged black patches marked hollows in which chestnut groves grew. Most remarkable was some atmospheric trick by which for an hour or so around high noon a deep blue boundary divided the horizon from the sky where the salt wind blew in from the sea.

  It was a setting that enchanted the Count, who had invited me to join him here for lunch on his saint’s day. Much of his early life, he said, had been spent in an attempt to escape the flatness of Venice. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a landscape that takes wings.’

  The waiters, silent, swift and starched into their outdated uniforms, transported us into the vanished kingdom of Victor Emmanuel III and its servilities that had survived in this environment. ‘If I am not disturbing the gentlemen,’ the head waiter said, ‘may I present our menu of the day?’ What was on offer, in its elaborations and absurdities, also recalled an exaggerated past. Cardollini prati di Lazio (goldfinches from the fields of Latium), four on a skewer, baby octopus no bigger than a large spider — of which a sample was produced — pig’s snout Viterbo style, braised with assorted fungus; testicles of milk lamb in saffron rice. The Count swept the suggestions away with patrician contempt. ‘A decadent imposture,’ he said, in reference to the Di Stefano cuisine. ‘I am a simple eater.’ To the waiter he said, ‘Give me a woodpigeon, if you can assure me that it is not from the deep-freeze.’ The waiter returned a slight bow. ‘It can be feathered in Sir’s presence if Sir desires,’ he said. ‘At least the flesh is wholesome,’ the Count assured me. ‘At this time of the year the birds feed on nuts.’ I agreed to follow his example.

  Cautiously I watched the men in dark suits, who hardly raised their eyes, absorbed with food. They were stamped with a strange uniformity in clothing, facial expression and gesture. A few were accompanied by glamorous women from whom they seemed strangely aloof and who were on show here rather as part of the accepted setting of mafiosi lives. Surreptitiously I studied the nearest couple as the man chewed thoughtfully on the tiny black carcase removed from a skewer before raising the little flower-painted bowl to his lips to dispose of the inedible aftermath. His friend displayed in profile the sweet emptiness of a Meissen shepherdess as she raked on a lobster shell with a silver claw. A musician in medieval trappings moved quietly into position behind them and began to scrape on his violin, and the man instantly dropped a 5,000-lire note on the table and dismissed him with a flick of the forefinger.

  ‘He is eating a sparrow in the belief that it is a goldfinch,’ said the Count, sotto voce, and almost without moving his lips. ‘On the same principle he pays dearly for the kisses of a courtesan to convince himself they are those of love. You have heard of men of respect?’ I told him I had. ‘This is the Rome style. Even those who manipulate the rulers of our country can be deluded. Even they can be made fools of.’

  Below us a boy and girl moved into sight on a short length of road visible beneath us skirting the rock as it unwound uphill. The girl was the Count’s seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, Zo-Zo, and the boy her fourteen-year-old village admirer whose father followed the profession of wheelwright, still much in demand in an area where metalled surfaced roads were few, and farm carts still in use on the rough country tracks. The pair were inseparable, a situation which appeared to cause not the slightest surprise among our phlegmatic village neighbours. It was an imperturbability that appeared to be shared by the Count and his wife. ‘There they go again,’ he said on this occasion. ‘I cannot understand where the attraction lies in long walks under the midday sun, especially with Zo-Zo’s fair skin.’

  ‘What’s the news of her?’ I asked. ‘Will she be going to university?’

  ‘We’ve given up the idea. She wants to stay here.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Both Alice and I have decided she must do as she pleases. She’s on drugs. We have to keep an eye on her. It’s better she stays where she is.’

  I was staggered. I shook my head. ‘You amaze me. Zo-Zo — she seems such a quiet girl. I’d never have believed it. What a problem for you.’

  ‘The top form at the school was full of junkies. I imagine it still is. A dolce vita while it lasted, but what comes next? Dr Pecorella broke the news to me, but we’d suspected something of the kind.’

  ‘Wouldn’t one of the small provincial universities be something to consider?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have her, and in any case she wouldn’t stay. She’d take the first train back. I know her only too well.’

  ‘So you put up with the attachment. It can’t have been an easy decision for you and Alice to take.’

  ‘It wasn’t really difficult. The boy’s good for her. He keeps her quiet. I should explain both Alice and I are followers of Epicurus and he always comes to the rescue in situations like this.’

  ‘Didn’t he favour a luxurious style of life?’

  ‘Far from it,’ the Count said. ‘His doctrine was one of moderation. He recommends the pursuit of sensible satisfactions and a calm approach to emergency. Whenever it is possible, he says, take the easy way out, which is what we are doing in this case. Zo-Zo is home. She is here to stay, and we cannot rid ourselves of our responsibility, even if that were possible, by burying her in a university. This being the case, let her be as happy as she can.’ He pointed to a verse in archaic and barely readable lettering fixed to the restaurant’s wall. It was by Lorenzo II Magnifico, regarded by some as the great man’s inevitable descent into triteness when he took time off from statesmanship to venture on the more difficult path of poetic composition.

  Quanto e bella giovinezza

  — Che se fugge tuttavia,

  Chi vuol’ essere lieto sia,

  De doman’ non v’e certezza.*

  At this moment the waiter appeared with a trolley with a covered dish over a low burner containing the pigeons. A junior followed at his heels with another, charged with a great variety of contorni, momentarily inspected by the Count who showed a trace of irritation before waving them away. ‘Just the pigeons,’ he said to the waiter. He turned to me. ‘How extraordinary,’ he said, ‘that the Master’s reputation in Italy should be as it is despite his complete indifference to food.’

  * How beautiful is youth,

  As it escapes us,

  Take what joy you can of it.

  Of the morrow there’s no knowing.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THE SEASON OF THE shooting of birds came to an end and the sportsmen from Rome, having disposed of the only remaining targets in the way of stray dogs and cats, went their way. Such sport as the area now offered was on a depressed level, attracting a few enthusiasts to the shores of Lake Bracciano where they fished for a unique and primitive fish sheltering in its muddy depths, described as of repellent flavour, but beneficial in the treatment of genito-urinary complaints. We were now in the season when the pigs were killed and turned into fearsome-looking sausages gorged with chilies, fat and blood.

  It was to the pig-killing that the superstitious attributed the coming of the rains which were as violent here in their uninterrupted downpourings as anywhere else on earth. When the rains stopped with a sudden finality — as if by the turning off of a cosmic tap — the weak sunshine of the pre-Christmas lull illuminated the land, and in this period of decline of the year small dramas that might have been overlooked in the grand drama of high summer drew attention and excited comment. At Monte S. Vito one of those gentle, white bulls that despite their outward placidity were said to bear grudges, turned suddenly on the farmer who owned it and skewered him with a long, elegant horn. An epidemic of stomach trouble with several near fatalities was traced to a wine producer who added various chemical intoxicants as well as quanti
ties of banana skins to his grapes. In Tarquinia a man, having been arrested on a charge of grave-robbing and selling Etruscan antiques to a friend of the Count, was able to prove that he had manufactured these himself. Fregene was the scene of a freak storm, quite unexpected at this time of the year, which picked up a small yacht and dumped it in a field, and then, with a switch round of the wind, floated a car out to sea. Pilgrims hastening to a hill village behind Tivoli where the Virgin was reported in a newspaper as having appeared to the locals on several occasions, found that these miracles were no more than part of a plot to sell land in the vicinity.

  Isola Farnese was subjected to its own minor sensation. Bruno, Zo-Zo’s young suitor, had been sent off to Rieti on a short course designed to prepare him for entry into his father’s profession. This left Zo-Zo, otherwise without friends in the locality, very much at a loose end. One evening a loud outcry from the children playing outside sent us rushing into the street to be confronted with the sight of Zo-Zo promenading on top of the thirty-foot-high outer castle wall, flapping her arms in imitation of a bird in flight. This was shortly after an addiction to LSD had spread to Italy, and some of those who had experimented with its use, becoming victims of the delusion that they were able to fly, had jumped or fallen from high places to their death. It was a spectacle that brought the whole of the village’s inhabitants into the open. Implored not to move she cavorted, pranced and flapped and laughed shrilly. The fire brigade in La Storta could not be reached on the phone in the bar, so a man was dispatched on a Lambretta to raise the alarm, but by the time the fire engine arrived it was all over, and with a final flap and a titter Zo-Zo had disappeared from sight.

  Suddenly an ebullient and vociferous Christmas was upon us, blending under Roman influence the celebratory styles of all the Christian world. In the Piazza Navona the shepherds brought down from the Abruzzi wheezed their prehistoric bagpipe music against a tableau of Santa Claus drawn by reindeer on his sleigh and nativity cribs peopled by pseudo-Palestinians of the first century. The crib had been introduced from Byzantium. The masked dancers on stilts, most applauded of all the strolling players, had arrived via Venice, from their place of Saracenic origin. The Corriere reported that a hundred stalls selling sweets, toys and seasonal souvenirs had been counted in the Piazza. Visitors consumed ritual nuts, sugared almonds and torrone by the hundredweight. Most popular with the children was liquorice, hung in thin strips like long black bootlaces from many stalls, and those who overindulged were hurried away to a little vomitorium concealed in a corner of the square.

  The Count and his wife spent much of the holiday in Rome in their penthouse flat, possessing from its windows over the Spanish Steps one of the most superb prospects of the urban world. Throwing open the shutters for us to look down upon the endless multitudes ascending and descending the steps the Count, as he frequently did, quoted Dante: I had not thought death had undone so many. At his back incunabula in antique bindings spilled from the bookshelves among the feet of statues deprived of noses, ears or toes. Alice looked forward to an orgy of shopping. The feast of the nativity and the great winter solstice was also that of consumerism, with the shop windows baited with seasonal extravagances of every kind. It was alleged by Annunziata that she hired a car with a driver for the period to be driven slowly backwards and forwards up and down the main shopping thoroughfares, exultantly studying through binoculars what was on offer behind the glass sprayed with plastic snow.

  For their Christmas dinner itself, to which we were invited, the pair returned to Isola Farnese. What was extraordinary about this gathering was that most of the guests were from families employing Scottish nannies, and not only spoke perfect English, but appeared to prefer to converse with each other in this, rather than in Italian. Several of them had been reduced to destitution by the war and its aftermath, surviving now with considerable grace on less, probably, than one of our villager’s income by doing odd jobs round the ministries in Rome, preparing well-written persuasive applications for government posts and correctly filling in the forms required in the case of foreign residents for even such prosaic operations as buying a new car. One of these, immaculate in his attire and with the presence of a functionary at the Papal Court, owned a castle within sight of Tarquinia which he offered to sell me, as he admitted with little more than a forlorn hope, for the equivalent of £5,000. His description of it was stunningly frank. ‘Let me say that only one room is habitable,’ he said. ‘Even then not in winter. I am happy for my neighbours to keep chickens in the rest, for which they repay me with a dozen eggs from time to time.’

  After dinner the Count and Alice went off in a hurry back to the excitements of Rome leaving Zo-Zo with Annunziata. This proved to be a mistake. For some reason Bruno was off the scene at this time, but Annunziata agreed to look after the girl, who preferred to stay in Isola Farnese, and to give her a bedroom in her house. For several days all was quiet, and then at about eight in the evening of the day before her parents were due back, the shrill and tocsin-like bell of the telephone the Count had just presented us with rang for the first time. It was a panic-stricken, hardly coherent aunt ringing from Rome. Zo-Zo had telephoned her from the castle of Isola Farnese to say that she was about to commit suicide. The woman had been unable to reach the parents whom she believed to have gone to the theatre. There was no reply from the police at La Storta, and I was the only person she could appeal to in the crisis.

  The problem now arose of my complete ignorance of the geography of a vast building of which I had only seen an extremely small part. The ground-floor rooms were roughly rectangular and without complication. When first the possibility had existed of our occupying the principal wing the Count had taken me up to the first floor to point out the bedrooms that went with it, and I noted then that access to these along passages and up and down sundry flights of stairs was dark and labyrinthine. These rooms in the upper storey were small but numerous and I remembered that there were two wings of the castle in which I had not set foot, and if it came to a search for the suicidal Zo-Zo it now occurred to me that this was an operation into which the whole village population would have to be enlisted.

  The agonizing choice was whether to go for help in a case when a few minutes delay could have been fatal, or to drop everything and get to the scene of whatever was happening as fast as my legs could carry me. I chose the second alternative and rushed up to the castle where I found the small door protected by security devices giving access to the family’s apartments significantly open, and the lights in the entrance hall switched on. Through this I plunged into the enormous principal room, a blaze of light and a distorted uproar of rock music belting out from loudspeakers suspended under the ceiling. At the far end of the room a wide staircase led to a landing where it divided to continue to the first floor. Lamps stood at each side of the foot of the staircase, and on the landing had been switched on as if in preparation for the arrival of guests for a splendid party. I ran up the staircase, down corridors, through a library, a billiard room, a chapel, bedrooms, a room where theatre props had been stacked, a laundry, through medieval nooks and crannies of every size and shape, lost and found my way again, always in the stark, shadowless illumination of innumerable lamps, and pursued by the moan and clamour of rock singers turned up to the maximum, and the hammering of drums.

  There was nothing to be done in the end but to get help. Annunziata and her husband lived at the far end of the village. Our Fiat was parked outside the house a hundred yards away but refused to start. I called to the man who ran the bar, and who was standing in his doorway, ‘Trouble with the Count’s daughter.’ He jerked back his head in a local gesture conveying sympathy without involvement, his hands held together before his chest as if to display an oracular inscription. ‘Eh-eh,’ he shouted.

  I was gasping for breath by the time I reached Annunziata’s house, where I found her husband, Ricardo, a notable idler, sipping coffee. I tried to make him understand the extreme urgency of the situation, b
ut he remained immutably passive. ‘Not a moment to lose,’ I shouted. He took a last gulp of coffee, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘You don’t know her. I do.’ We set off. ‘For God’s sake hurry,’ I begged him. ‘They won’t let me,’ he said, patting his rib cage in reference to some obscure complaint that kept him largely out of action.

  I waited in the glare and the continuing hubbub of the big room for him to catch up and we went up the stairs together and found Zo-Zo in the only bedroom I’d managed to overlook. An empty pill bottle was tipped over on the bedside table, and under it had been placed a farewell note written in a firm hand on a sheet of paper scrawled otherwise with astromantic signs. Ricardo leaned over her, as I first supposed tenderly, curled back an eyelid, then lifting her with one arm round her shoulders, struck her with some force across the face with his open hand. He then let her drop back. ‘You have to know what to do, that’s all,’ he said.

  Ten minutes later the ambulance arrived, bringing with it Annunziata, two white-coated ambulance men carrying a machine sprouting tubes, and a doctor with a forked beard and a denunciatory stare. ‘Members of the family?’ he asked us. We shook our heads and he shoved us through the door.