by John Harris
‘Doesn’t it worry them?’ Hannay asked, indicating the noisy vitality in the square.
‘It doesn’t appear to,’ Patch said, and Hannay realised for the first time that he hadn’t even bothered to change his position, hadn’t even stopped scratching on the menu card.
‘It didn’t appear to worry ’em last time either,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘All they did was have a few bets on the date of the next one. I suppose that’s what they’re talking about now – whether they’ve won or not.’
He looked up at Hannay’s bewildered face and went on to explain. ‘The mountain’s not erupted since 1762,’ he said. ‘And in its time the place’s been ravaged by the Greeks, the Trojans, the Romans, the Venetians, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English and, not so very long ago, the Germans and the Americans. What’s a rumble or two? It’s rather like telling a monkey it’s got another flea.’
Hannay was staring up at Amarea, still unconvinced, and Patch grinned and tried to soothe the doubt out of his eyes. ‘It’s been doing it for years,’ he said. ‘Nobody worries unless it puts the lights out or damages the telephone lines. Then they complain to one of the observatories and a commission arrives weighed down with importance and instruments and bursting with the desire to reassure everybody. But since you can’t very well use a plumber on a volcano, that’s about all they can do. They potter around the place with gravimeters looking grave and knowledgeable and when they go away all they appear to have done is issue a report saying there’s nothing to worry about. The Mayor sticks it up on the town notice boards and everybody’s happy.’
Hannay listened with interest and, as Patch finished, he lit the cigarette Patch had pushed across. Drawing in a lung-full of smoke, he spluttered violently and took the cigarette out of his mouth again quickly. ‘Christ,’ he muttered in awed tones, staring at it with suspicion.
He looked up. ‘You smoke these Eyetie things?’ he asked incredulously.
Patch nodded. ‘I have to. I ran out of English ones years ago.’
A thought crossed Hannay’s mind that hadn’t occurred to him before. He glanced at Patch, lounging at the other side of the table under the withered orange trees that lined the pavement, still drawing happily.
‘You live here or something?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Patch looked up. There was nothing offensive in the question and he attributed it to Hannay’s North Country curiosity. He considered for a moment before replying, and came to the conclusion that there didn’t seem to be any reasonable answer. There were plenty of places in Italy far more accessible that he could have lived in, and he could only put it down to a natural contrariness that he should have preferred Anapoli to the more traditional places with their wealth of free models and easy colour.
His constant efforts to avoid conventionality in his work had led him on a long road from one chilly studio to another, in London, New York, Paris and Rome, with models who failed to turn up for fear of not being paid, with never enough to eat and never anything at all to drink, until at last the irrepressible exuberance for life that still managed to show through in his paintings had caught the interests of the critics and had started a fashion in the popular galleries with nothing much to offer but weary modernism. He had suddenly found himself not having to seek commissions but dodge them and had made his way to Italy and finally to Anapoli, he decided, largely as a means of avoiding the infectious limpness of twentieth-century art.
He looked across at Hannay, with his square red face and blue unemotional eyes and decided that perhaps he wouldn’t understand even if he tried to enlighten him, so he plumped in the end for the simplest explanation.
‘I live here because I don’t like Capri,’ he said, gesturing with the menu card at a fly. ‘Besides, it’s cheaper.’
Hannay didn’t seem to appreciate his efforts to save him trouble and looked aggressively back at him.
‘What’s wrong with England?’ he demanded.
‘What’s right with it?’
‘It suits me.’
‘That’s fine then.’
Patch gave the sailor a beaming untroubled smile that somehow managed to annoy him and went on with his scribbling.
Hannay stared for a moment, puzzled by his indifference to what was the be-all and end-all of his own life.
‘How d’you manage to live here?’ he asked.
‘It’s very easy. I wash. I shave, I eat and sleep. The usual.’
Hannay frowned. ‘I mean, what do you do?’
‘I paint.’
‘Oh!’ Hannay seemed startled, as though he were immediately out of his depth, and faintly disappointed, for he had half expected Patch to be nothing more than a remittance man he would have had the pleasure of disliking. To Hannay no one who worked for his living had a right to be so indolent about it.
‘What do you paint?’ he asked doubtfully.
Patch looked up and smiled again, conscious of Hannay’s disapproval. ‘Faces,’ he said. ‘I rent a couple of rooms from an old dear called Meucci round the corner. Come and have a drink some time. You can’t miss it. You can hear Mamma Meucci arguing a mile off.’
He casually threw across the menu card as though he had lost interest in it and Hannay stared at a fanciful likeness of himself, executed entirely in scribble, and surrounded by vignettes of the people he had seen about the piazza – the taxi-driver standing under the Garibaldi statue deep in argument with Hannay, the bill-poster and the group of small boys, Emiliano and his waiter, discussing the mountain.
‘That’s good,’ he said, pleased and beginning to regard Patch with a greater degree of warmth. ‘Annay’ll have that framed.’
He paused. ‘My wife had an uncle was an artist,’ he went on. ‘Oils. We’ve got two of his pictures at home. ‘Ighland cattle. All hair and horns.’ He stared at his fingers for a moment. ‘They look as if they’d been painted with brown paint on brown paper. He once did me. You’d have thought I’d been struck by lightning.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘I made a fire-screen of it,’ he explained.
Without thinking, he took another puff at the cigarette and began to cough, then he fished in his pocket and pushed a green tin across to Patch. ‘Have these,’ he said. ‘Ship’s Woodbines. Better than them bombs you smoke.’
He tossed away the Italian cigarette Patch had given him and, begging a Woodbine back, made himself comfortable, blowing smoke rings in silence for a moment, his eyes vaguely troubled again.
‘Isn’t it a bit like sitting on a land mine, Mister? – living ’ere, I mean.’
Patch thought the question over as he fished a couple of old envelopes from his back pocket. It had never occurred to him before to consider what went on inside the mountain underneath his feet. After two years of living in the Porto, with the islanders’ indifference to Amarea becoming as much a part of his everyday life as the old walls and the daubed signs, ‘Hail, the Queen of Heaven’ and ‘Up the Soviets’, that adorned them, he had long since taken it for granted that there was nothing to worry about. The mountain’s previous episodes of activity were all as lovingly remembered in the bars as its symptoms and had been related to him so often that he had come to regard them with much the same indifference as he regarded Mamma Meucci’s complaints about the neighbours.
‘It is a bit, I suppose,’ he said, starting to draw again on one of the envelopes. ‘But they’ve been sitting on it for hundreds of years. You get to like it in the end, in fact. It keeps your behind warm in winter. And, so far as I know, not more than half a dozen or so have ever been hurt by it. Even the big bang of 1892 only brought down a lot of soot.’
Looking like an anxious pug, Hannay was casting another glance over his shoulder at the mountain behind them, massive, sombre and silent, its sides brassy-gold in the glare that hit them at a tangent and slid into the clefts lower down as the island dropped abruptly into the Tyrrhenian.
‘Could it erupt?’ he asked.
‘I doubt
it. Not now. In any case, it had better not.’
‘Why not?’
Patch gestured at the fly again, finished his drink and ordered two more, then he leaned across the table, indicating to Hannay to listen. Through the narrow streets that wound up to it from the harbour, the sound of the loudspeaker car filtered into the piazza again, rebounding off the crumbling walls of the old buildings where the grass grew in the angles and along the gutterings.
‘That’s why not,’ he said. ‘If the mountain erupted, they’d have to postpone the election.’
Hannay snorted and Patch grinned.
‘They’ll be arguing over the result of the voting six months after it’s finished,’ he pointed out. ‘But I’ll lay you a pound to a penny that they won’t be discussing the mountain tomorrow.’
Hannay looked around him. The piazza was quietening down. Patch’s prophecies seemed as though they might be correct. The taxi-driver was starting up his car. The bill-poster was busy plastering the walls with posters once more. The politician from the Via Garibaldi was trudging across the square to the Via Venti Settembre on the other side, to tackle the loungers there who had come out to join the crowd and were now leaning against the wall, passing a cigarette from one to another. As he moved beneath the women on the balconies, they catcalled after him but he took no notice of the laughter and continued, an earnest, humourless, shabby figure in black, with his banner and his tricolour under one arm and the two boxes that made his dais slung by a piece of frayed string over the other. Emiliano and his friends had gone inside now to continue their discussion over the bar with the barber and his customer who still unconcernedly wore his linen swathe. The little boys had grown tired of the mountain and were playing a game. Only the crowd on the corner of the Via Garibaldi were still chattering excitedly to newcomers. Life seemed to be settling down again to normality.
‘Eruptions aren’t allowed to interfere with elections here,’ Patch explained cheerfully. He reached out and finally swatted the fly with a newspaper. ‘Got the bastard,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘Forla would lose a lot of money.’
‘Who’s Forla?’
‘Forla’s olives. Forla’s lemons. Forla’s wine. Forla’s the sulphur you’ve come for. Forla’s Anapoli and Anapoli’s Forla.’ Patch waved a hand towards the turrets of the vast house on the hill. ‘That’s Forla. He keeps his antiques there and the best part of his art collection. It’s one of the finest in Italy – all Botticellis and da Vincis, with a few fat Rubens thrown in to show he’s catholic in his tastes. He even bought one of mine for his house in Rome. He owns everything here, damn’ near. Even the mountain – so I suppose he’s got it as well under control as the rest of them.’
‘Does he live ’ere?’
‘Not he? Would you, if you could afford to live in Rome? He hasn’t been near the place for eighteen months. His nephew, Orlesi, runs it for him.’
‘Why would he lose a lot if the mountain erupted?’
‘It would drive away the inhabitants, and they’re leaving the islands fast enough as it is. They don’t like being so far from the big cities and the football and the television. And then who’d get your sulphur, who’d tend the vines and the olives? Who’d look after the tourists when they come? They don’t get many here but they give ’em the full treatment.’ Patch sat back. ‘The mountain can’t erupt,’ he concluded firmly. ‘Perhaps a little coloured smoke, or a pretty red glow at night like Stromboli. But that’s all.’
Hannay stared at Patch, beginning to wonder just what sort of man he was. He was clearly a man of confidence and skill. Even in the scrappy drawing he had thrown across the table the technique managed to show through. But his apparent indolence, his untidiness and faded clothes, puzzled Hannay as much as his indifference to everyone else’s opinion and the deep lines of humour on his face that contrasted so strongly with his cynical comments.
‘You lived here long?’ he asked.
‘Two years.’
‘Why here?’
Patch looked up, and decided to dodge the determined questioning once more. ‘I’ve nowhere else,’ he said.
He seemed as undisturbed by the mountain as the rest of the Porto and Hannay began to feel a little happier about sitting on an island beneath which the unknown shifts of rock appeared to be as normal as the morning sun.
‘Don’t you ever go home?’ he asked.
‘This is home.’
‘What about your friends?’
‘I’ve got none. I never did have many but I reduced the number radically when I made the mistake of quarrelling with the people back home who can make or break you. Gnomes, mental pygmies and push-Baptist schoolmarms, most of ’em – though they seem to do damn’ well out of it,’ he added ruefully. ‘My friends decided I was a distinct risk and dropped me like a hot brick.’
‘Fine friends you’ve got.’
‘Most of ’em have wives and families.’ Patch shrugged philosophically. ‘I’d never rate a couple of lines from some rat-faced reviewer in a trade weekly back home now.’
Hannay sat back, enjoying this introduction to what was to him an entirely new world. Then he became aware of a youngster about twelve standing alongside him, a handsome boy with a grave brown face and dark eyes, who wore an ill-fitting jacket and trousers that looked as though they’d been cut down from someone else’s suit. One of his cheeks was discoloured by a bruise that stretched from his eyebrow to his jaw.
Alongside him was an ageing mongrel dog which wore a muzzle that hung uselessly on its chest; and the boy smiled as Hannay stared at him, and heaved the muzzle over the dog’s jaws.
‘For the rabies, signore,’ he explained gravely. ‘All dogs must wear muzzles for the hot weather.’ As he straightened up, the dog promptly squatted down and freed its head once more, then sat up, grinning.
Patch was studying the boy, frowning. ‘You’ve been fighting again,’ he said severely. ‘You’ve got a black eye.’
‘No, Signor Tom.’ The boy turned to him, unsmiling. ‘It’s my uncle.’
‘Beating you again?’
‘Yes, signore.’
‘What for?’
‘I was late home last night, Signor Tom.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t like going home.’ The boy swung away from Patch and began gesturing at Hannay. Patch grinned.
‘He wants a cigarette,’ he pointed out. ‘Here, Cristoforo.’ He tossed a Woodbine across and the boy caught it and lit it from Patch’s, inhaling the smoke with deep grateful gasps.
‘Cristoforo’s my best model.’ Patch swung the boy round and pushed his chin up carelessly with the back of his hand. Cristoforo stood motionless, his fingers still clutching the cigarette so that the smoke curled up in blue tongues along his arm. ‘Look at those bones. Sharp as T-squares and clean as right angles. A draughtsman’s dream. That’s what Cristoforo is. Pure Greco. All set squares and French curves. An architect could draw Cristoforo.’
The boy was still standing with his head turned, his shoulders held back, motionless as the statue of Garibaldi in the middle of the piazza.
‘They have faces here,’ Patch went on. ‘Not pieces of pudding. Look at those nostrils and that upper lip. Better than those pre-Raphaelite virgins with buck teeth you hire back home. Look at his eyes. Colour. Colour all the time. Beautiful, expensive, exotic colour. And all for free. It used to cost me a fortune back home to get some wall-eyed witch who couldn’t sit still and whined all the time about the cold. All right, Cristoforo, relax.’ The boy dutifully lowered his head and took a drag at the cigarette.
‘I’ve painted Cristoforo as often as I’ve painted anyone,’ Patch concluded. ‘It works out well, too. Cristoforo’s an orphan. I used to pay him once but the uncle he lives with – a big brute called Angelo Devoto – took all the money. So now I buy him a good meal whenever he wants one and give him cigarettes.’
‘I don’t ’old with kids smoking,’ Hannay growled.
‘They all
do it.’ Patch turned to Cristoforo. ‘Good, Cristoforo?’
‘Si, Signor Tom. Grazie.’
‘In English, you little blighter. It’s useful to know English. Make lots of money if you speak English. Say it again.’
‘Yes, Sir Tom. Thank you.’
The boy spoke the words precisely but Patch was suddenly not paying attention. Both Cristoforo and Hannay were aware that his interest had been caught by a girl crossing the piazza, and he was drawing her quickly, his eyes half-closed, patently admiring her figure and the way she swung her hips as she walked.
‘Where’ve you been today?’ he asked over his shoulder, the tone of his voice indicating that only part of his mind was on Cristoforo, the other busy with the drawing he was making of the girl.
Cristoforo’s expression had changed subtly at the question, and even Hannay noticed the difference.
‘On the mountain, Signor Tom,’ the boy said. ‘We hunted snakes and lizards. Myself and Antonio Gori and Matteo Lipparini.’
The girl disappeared round the corner into the Via Garibaldi and Patch threw down the envelope in disgust and turned to Cristoforo again.
‘Find any?’ he asked.
Cristoforo’s brows came down so that the hair that fell over his forehead almost covered his eyes. His expression was anxious as well as puzzled and even Patch was aware of the doubt behind his pause.
‘Signor Tom, that is funny,’ he said eventually. ‘There are no lizards. Usually there are many. Today there are none. And no cicadas. There were no snakes either, signore. Not one snake, and under the folds of the lava and in the cactus bushes there are usually many. I’ve found them often.’
