The Sleeping Mountain

by John Harris

He found her vehemence amusing. She was very pretty with her slim figure and her small hands and ankles, her rebellious mouth and the hot blue eyes, and he began to wonder why he had never done anything about it.

  ‘Fifty years,’ she was saying. ‘It’s no longer than an afternoon in a lifetime, no longer than it takes you to put your hat on.’

  ‘I know it isn’t, Cecilia.’ He tried to calm down the anger in her, the sort of indignant anger he hadn’t managed to rouse in himself for years. ‘But nobody’s losing any sleep over it. Believe me, nobody’s worrying.’

  ‘Nobody worried last time,’ she said. ‘They won’t be worrying next time. They’ll be singing and making love and producing children and holding elections, then – poof–’ she snapped her fingers ‘–suddenly there’ll be no elections and no songs and no love and no children.’

  Patch looked up as her anger curled round him. He had been able to thrust aside Hannay’s fears as those of someone unfamiliar with the ways of the island and Mont’ Amarea. Cristoforo’s he had thought were merely those of an excited child. But now, here it was again, the doubt behind all those eyes that turned upwards towards the mountain every time it rumbled. Here again was that silence that came after the vibrations, when they all waited for the next move that didn’t arrive, a silence full of crowding thoughts of what went on under their feet where the white-hot rock shifted uneasily miles down where no one could measure it, a silence that brought home to them their own lack of knowledge, their uncertainty, and that bare ugly mountain behind the town, dark now, probably treacherous, and certainly unknowable.

  Cecilia was still watching him, her eyes hot, and he shifted restlessly under her gaze. ‘Cecilia,’ he said, waving his cup, ‘apart from rumbles and a little ash and smoke, the damned mountain’s been silent for two hundred years.’

  ‘So–’ she swung fiercely round on him again, her face close to his, ‘–it follows it will be silent for another two hundred?’ She shrugged, suddenly deflated, and tried to smile. ‘Perhaps it’s nothing,’ she said, turning towards the window again. ‘Perhaps it’s just the heat.’

  A blare of cacophonic noise from the loudspeaker van by the harbour exploded into argument up the narrow street and burst like an intruder into the room. As she frowned and glanced towards the window, Patch stared approvingly at the curve of her thighs and hips in the yellow dress and the lines of her breast and neck and shoulders. Then she swung round and looked at him frankly, suddenly very young again as her eyes lost their heat and became large and defenceless, her expression unguarded.

  ‘The staccatos are coming more frequently,’ she said. ‘And the mountain seems so close.’

  He moved nearer to her. ‘Cecilia, I’ll be going to Naples soon,’ he pointed out with a gentleness that seemed oddly out of character. ‘If it worries you, come with me and get away from this place. I could use a model. You hate Anapoli. You know you do. You’re a bit like the mountain yourself, in fact. You’re always simmering on the point of an explosion.’

  She smiled up at him, her eyes bright, and shook her head. ‘There are plenty of models in Naples. There are models for the asking there.’

  ‘None I’d rather paint than you.’

  ‘I don’t want to come. Naples is a big city to be alone in with you.’

  ‘You’ll stay here looking after your grandfather for ever.’

  ‘That’s why I came here when my mother died.’ Her voice held the islanders’ fatalistic acceptance of life that never failed to antagonise the cheerful realist in Patch.

  ‘Oh, to the Devil with why you came!’ he said. ‘You’re too damn’ pretty to be an old maid or married to some fool like Piero, with a house full of children and only the church for consolation. Come to Naples. I’d be around to look after you.’

  ‘Like you did with Mrs Hayward when she went to Rome?’ Cecilia’s eyebrows lifted.

  Patch’s smile changed abruptly to a scowl. His entanglement with Mrs Hayward, the acknowledged leader of the middle-class foreign colony on the island, the set that totally ignored the poor of the Porto and aped the aristocracy and the business magnates who found their way to Forla’s palace, had been the general property of the Via Pescatori for some time. ‘Why bring her up?’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Giovanetta Pariani then? Or Margharita Silona? Or–?’

  Patch had been watching her affectionately but now his quick temper rose.

  ‘Where the hell do you get all these god-damned names?’

  Cecilia was laughing openly at him now, enjoying his discomfort. ‘I’ve only to keep my ears open. You weren’t very careful when you first came to Anapoli. If I looked further, I suppose I could find more names from Naples, and Sorrento and Capri and Florence.’

  ‘I was painting Margharita,’ he explained noisily, and for Cecilia without a great deal of conviction. ‘Not that she was any good. She’s got no neck and feet like a pair of waders. I was never in love with the damned woman.’

  ‘You never are.’

  He studied her for a moment, at a loss for something to say, baffled by her skilful handling of him, the sure knowledge of his secrets that she used like a weapon against him, then he turned away, still oddly concerned that she should know more of life than Anapoli could offer her.

  ‘Naples will be coming to its best just now,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We could go to Capri. Or Ischia.’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not coming. I know you too well. I know of all the other girls who’ve been with you.’

  ‘You could still come to see the lights.’

  She turned away from him. ‘I’d be running away if I did.’

  He looked up, irritated by her stubbornness, and baffled by her concern with what seemed to him nothing more than merely a mountain with a stomach disorder.

  ‘Running away? From what?’

  ‘Something’s – going to happen,’ she persisted. ‘I know it is. I can feel it.’

  He grinned, admitting defeat. ‘OK, then, you can feel it. You can certainly feel something. That’s obvious. But perhaps it’s nothing more than indigestion. Or the election. Or another storm like this morning. Anything on God’s good earth. You should enjoy yourself before it happens. I do. For the first time in my life I’m doing what I like and for the first time in my life I can afford to. I don’t have to flog my pants to buy brushes, or my shirts for money to haggle with an old Shylock in a junk shop over some dreary painting I want to use the back of for a spanking new idea that warrants decent canvas. It’s hard when you’re happy to get upset about a mountain that doesn’t know whether it wants a belch or a haircut.’

  Six

  The following evening, Patch was painting as he changed his clothes, standing by the window, holding his trousers up with one hand as he angrily jabbed lemon yellow paint at a large canvas with the other. Around him were the odds and ends from his studio which he had collected for Mamma Meucci to remove, in his weekly effort to make the place more presentable; the boom he had borrowed, an assortment of dirty pots and pans, the empty bottles, the paint-spotted newspapers. In the middle of the task, the painting had caught his interest again and he was now completely absorbed, the clearing up forgotten, the dressing he had started in the middle of the clearing up forgotten too.

  Mamma Meucci came panting into his room with bread and cheese and wine, the whole of her amiable fourteen stone wobbling with eagerness, the odour of garlic from the kitchen that clung to her clothes sweeping before her like a miasma. The two children who came with her immediately crossed to the spare easel and stared at the painting of Cecilia Leonardi which Patch had started the previous night.

  ‘Her nose is too long,’ one of them commented severely. ‘She’s not as pretty as that either.’

  Patch threw down his brush angrily.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to come into the bloody room without knocking?’ he shouted, swinging round on Mamma Meucci. ‘I’m not dressed. And get those bl
asted bambini out before they knock something over.’

  Mamma Meucci brushed aside the two children who fled towards her. ‘Signor Tom,’ she shrieked, laughing breathlessly. ‘What does it matter if I see you undressed? I’m an old woman and God made you all the same. Many times I’ve seen my husband without his trousers. Whenever it happens there is a new bambino.’

  Shaking with laughter, she edged backwards towards the corridor, knocking over the pile of household implements he had stacked up for her to remove, and sending them crashing to the floor.

  ‘Signor Tom,’ she panted, picking them up one after the other and stuffing them under her arms. ‘Almost you make me forget. There is a letter for you. The Signora Hayward left it with old Tornielli.’

  Patch put down the brush he had picked up again and stared at her for a moment, puzzled and suspicious. It was unlike Mrs Hayward to visit the narrow alleys of the Porto. She belonged to the hotel with its bright colours and potted palms and the little newspaper stand which in the season sold the New York Herald Tribune and the Paris Soir and the fat magazines from across the Atlantic, all out of date but food and drink to the enthusiastic elderly ladies who came eagerly to Anapoli to see the Greek remains in Colonna del Greco and to examine the Church of Sant’ Agata and then found none of the comfort beyond the gaudy foyer of the hotel that they were used to in Venice and the Vittorio Veneto in Rome.

  He opened the letter slowly, his mind still on the writer. It stood out a mile to everyone – and everyone in Anapoli Porto was always interested in everyone else – that Mrs Hayward, an immigrant to Anapoli from the displaced British official classes in India, had made the frantic marriage of a young woman on some God-forsaken station where her husband was perhaps the only eligible man. She had pounced on Patch the minute he had arrived on the island and was still, after two years, loath to take her claws out of him.

  It. was an affair which had fluctuated for her between ecstatic heights of excitement and the depths of misery and vindictiveness when Patch fought to hold her at arm’s length during the periods when she grew reckless. For the most part its impetus had been given to it by Mrs Hayward’s desperate craving for vitality after her husband’s cheerful dullness, and it had moved in fits and starts throughout his occasional visits to the mainland.

  Still holding his trousers with one hand, Patch dropped the envelope on the floor where Mamma Meucci stared at it indignantly, and read the note.

  ‘Dear Tom–’ the passionate hurried scrawl went well with Mrs Hayward’s garish blondeness, ‘–Must see you. Important. Let me know when.’

  It contained a hint of the old desperation, the old craving for excitement, and Patch was growing tired of Mrs Hayward’s hysterical desperation. He had no wish to become embroiled again in any affair with her, with all the embarrassment it meant for him and the misery it meant for her. He stared at the letter for a moment, then he grinned at Mamma Meucci and screwed it up into a ball.

  ‘Anything important, Signor Tom?’ Mamma Meucci was quivering with curiosity, bursting to know the latest on the affair.

  Patch picked up his brush again and shook his head. ‘She wants me to referee a boxing match,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

  Mamma Meucci gaped at him disbelievingly, then she stepped into the corridor, dropping the broom and the buckets with a clatter as though she had crashed into something.

  ‘Signor Tom–’ her voice came to Patch excitedly as she backed into the room, ‘–there is someone to see you!’

  ‘Oh, my God, no!’ Patch exploded again. ‘It’s like a bloody railway station in here with people running in and out all the time. Tell ’em to go away. Tell ’em I’m sick. Tell ’em I’m dead!’

  Mamma Meucci cackled hoarsely and seemed to grope into the dimness of the corridor as though rummaging into a dark cupboard. It was Hannay she produced, and she pushed him into the room with both hands flat on his back. He looked a little sheepish and stood uncertainly by the door, at a loss for a moment as Patch completely ignored him.

  He was in front of the easel again by this time, absorbed in painting once more, placidly holding his trouser tops while he dabbed lemon yellow on the canvas.

  Hannay watched for a while, listening to Mamma Meucci’s noise in the corridor as she drove her children away, and the arguments from above and the oompa-oompa of old Tornielli’s trombone that floated up the staircase to join the yells of the baby and the shouting of the squalling children; then he stared round the shambles of Patch’s living-room, with its discarded clothes and bits of statuary, the enormous brass bedstead littered hopelessly with drawings and old shoes in magnificent confusion, and the picture of the Virgin Mary that Mamma Meucci had hung on the wall when she had first discovered Patch was a painter and now spent most of its time backside-outwards because Patch couldn’t bear to look at the appalling workmanship, all the odds and ends of an artist’s studio hopelessly intermingled with the paraphernalia of what fragmentary domesticity Patch possessed.

  Hannay coughed but Patch seemed to have been stricken with deafness. He cleared his throat noisily and tried again, but with the same results.

  ‘Hell,’ he said at last, to draw Patch’s attention to himself. ‘I thought I was never going to find you. Proper rabbit warren, this place, innit?’

  Patch finally condescended to notice him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Except when it rains. Tornielli won’t repair the roof. He says he’s no head for heights and it’s easier to let it fall in.’ He hitched up his trousers a little and crossed towards Hannay. ‘Here, stand like this for a bit.’

  He jerked Hannay’s arm up and while he was still startled into motionlessness hurried back to his canvas.

  ‘Ere, what’s the idea?’

  ‘Don’t move, you bloody fool! You’ll come out as Mercury picking fruit. You look as though you could be the champion fruit-picker in the whole of the world. That’s the best of Italy. Models are so cheap. Pity you’ve got a face like an old sea-boot. You’d do well at it.’

  ‘Am I in a picture?’ Hannay seemed pleased as he spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘Your jacket is. It’s much more interesting than you are. I want the fold of the sleeve. It’s always a sod from this angle. Come and look. You can move now.’

  Hannay moved to the easel, then his expression changed as he stared. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Primavera,’ Patch explained enthusiastically. ‘Spring. It’s a copy of Botticelli in modern dress with a touch of Bastier Millais. Ever seen Millais?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve not missed anything. This is much better. It’s the period of awakening after a war. There’ll be four. Summer’s the high noon of prosperity, Autumn’s the gathering clouds, and Winter’s war again. War’s seasonal these days, after all, isn’t it? Like it?’

  ‘They look like a lot of pansies to me,’ Hannay said bluntly. ‘Look how that bloke’s standing. He looks as if he’s caught himself on something.’

  Patch stared at him, stung by the criticism.

  ‘What’s biting you?’ he demanded. ‘In need of a drink or something?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Hannay admitted. ‘But I get dead sick of boozing with Anderson, that Number One of mine. All he talks about is the women he’s slep’ with. ‘E makes me ship sound like a knocking-shop.’

  Patch grinned. ‘I’ll join you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got plenty of time.’

  He put down the paint brush and adjusted his trousers. ‘I was just trying to tidy the place up,’ he said. ‘I was supposed to be doing it when you arrived. Mamma Meucci’s done it once today but it seems to fall apart again the minute I come in.’

  He stacked a pile of magazines into Hannay’s arms and gave him a push. ‘Shove ’em in the corridor,’ he said. ‘Mamma’ll shift ’em.’

  Hannay disappeared and when he returned he hesitated in the doorway, clearly troubled by something. ‘I saw that nipper again today,’ he said. ‘Cristoforo.’

  The overtones of anxiety
in his voice made Patch straighten up from where he was folding his clothes over a chair.

  ‘He’d been up the mountain again,’ Hannay said. ‘He was scared. He said the smoke was worse. He said you could even smell it.’

  Patch had stopped fiddling with the clothes. ‘I should tell Cristoforo to leave it to the boys in the observatories,’ he said gently. ‘They know the score.’

  Hannay said nothing, standing by the door as though only a charge of dynamite would shift him. He seemed annoyed. ‘Suppose it erupts?’ he said eventually. ‘I saw Vesuvius in 1944.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. It should be interesting.’

  Hannay stared at him, infuriated by his indifference. ‘Did you know I went to see the Mayor about it last night?’ he asked.

  Patch grinned. ‘Sure. Tornielli lives here. We get to know everything that opens and shuts at the Town Hall. Goes through the building like a dose of salts. Tornielli’s the Adonis who helps Pelli.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem very bothered,’ Hannay said. ‘The Mayor, I mean.’

  ‘Neither does anybody else. Except you, that is.’

  ‘Don’t they? That just shows how much you know about the place.’

  The words struck a chord as Patch was reminded of Cecilia’s comment the previous night: ‘How little you understand us,’ she’d said.

  ‘Well, then, who is worrying?’ he asked. ‘You’re the only one I’ve seen who’s doing any bitching.’ He lost interest in the clothing he was trying to tidy and threw it behind a curtain.

  ‘Cristoforo’s worrying,’ Hannay said.

  ‘He’s only a kid.’

  ‘And there was an old geezer I heard talking in a café down there. An old bloke with long white hair looked like Old Nick down on his luck.’

  ‘That’s old Leonardi.’ Patch straightened up from jerking the curtain into place. ‘He was here when the bang occurred in 1892, so he considers himself the mountain’s personal custodian and friend. He even calls himself “Doctor” Leonardi but he’s no more a doctor than you are or I am. He’s got no instruments, no charts, nothing. But he’s been prophesying disaster ever since the turn of the century. Nobody ever takes any notice of him now. He lives here, too. On the floor below. We have everyone worth knowing in the Via Pescatori. I’ll have to introduce you to him. He’ll scare your tripes out with his talk of volcanoes. You’ll love it.’