by John Harris
Both the Meuccis were there, arguing with Tornielli and each other and shouting up to the old lady across the street who was a cripple and unable to descend the stairs.
Mamma Meucci broke off as she saw Patch and rushed across to him.
‘Signor Tom,’ she shrieked. ‘The end has come. The Holy Souls in Purgatory protect us! The mountain’s about to erupt!’
Then he realised that it was from the darkness high up behind the town that he could hear the hissing. It came from the direction of the crater and was back-grounded by a dry clacking sound.
Its very unusualness was frightening, its very unexpectedness enough to set the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. But even through the apprehension that started in him as he remembered the grisly pictures Dr Leonardi had drawn, he realised that in spite of the noise there was no other apparent sign of danger.
He gave Mamma Meucci a cigarette as she clung to his arm, and lit it for her. She drew on it greedily, her eyes wild. ‘Holy Mother of Mercy, we’ve not heard it like this since 1931,’ she said, blowing out smoke and waving her hands at him. ‘Signor Tom, we are all awakened by the noise. Little Stefano starts to cry. Then he wakes up Giuliano and soon we are all awake. Signor Tom, what should we do?’
Patch stared up into the darkness beyond the houses, surprised that Hannay and Cecilia and Cristoforo and all the others had been right. There seemed no longer any question about the mountain being dead. It obviously wasn’t. But he could still see nothing to indicate danger and the noise was already growing less.
He patted Mamma Meucci’s arm. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d go back to bed.’
‘There you are, Mamma.’ Meucci appeared from the crowd as Patch finished speaking, and smacked his wife’s fat behind. ‘You hear what he says. We are still here. It’s only a lot of noise. Nothing more.’ He gave her a shove. ‘Get back to bed. Signor Tom says go back to bed. I say go back to bed. Now are you satisfied?’
His wife turned swiftly on him. ‘Are you satisfied, Meucci?’
Meucci’s gaiety dispersed abruptly and as he glanced at Patch there was that same look in his eyes that expressed the doubt and bewilderment that Patch had seen by the harbour the previous day. Then he smiled quickly and pushed his wife again.
‘Quite satisfied, Mamma. Now let’s go back to bed or the children will be shouting.’
Now that they were all awake, though, nobody seemed to want to go to bed. Through the excitement engendered by the violent hissing – as though a gigantic jet of steam were being released – it was obvious that they preferred to cling to each other’s company. Even argument was reassuring in the unexpected racket the mountain was setting up. Bottles of wine appeared, and coffee, and even plates of pasta, and what had been a startled rush for the communal comfort of the street ended up as a slightly hysterical party.
Patch stayed for a while, then he grew tired of the crowd and set off back to his room. On the way, he caught up with old Leonardi labouring up the stairs. The old man seemed delighted by the turn of events.
‘In the full moon it’ll come,’ he said excitedly. ‘You see. With the full moon. For thirty years I’ve been wrong but one day the laughter will turn to tears when I’m proved right.’
He trudged on up the stone steps, heaving his creaking legs up one after the other, conscious of the drag of his old body. There had been a time when he had skipped up the stairs to his apartment as he had skipped up Amarea to make the investigations for the charges that had always proved wrong, so wrong, in fact, so regularly wrong that it had become an obsession with him that he must be right.
‘Come and have a coffee,’ he said to Patch, ‘and I’ll show you the photographs I take when I climb Stromboli in 1935.’
In the shabby apartment, Patch brooded over the self-portraits of old Leonardi in mountaineering clothes posturing on folds of cold lava, then as Cecilia brought in the coffee, they noticed the hissing from the mountain had ceased and only the high-pitched clacking sound remained.
‘Amarea’s quiet again,’ Cecilia said.
‘It’s not quiet inside,’ old Leonardi said gaily, clicking his teeth and waving both hands to indicate effervescence. ‘That’s why we hear banging still. That’s why we have the staccatos. They tell me you could see the glasses jiggling on the tables in the Galleria Umberto in Naples before Vesuvius erupts in 1944. Even Pompeii is shaken to its foundations just before it is destroyed. This place is part of the Campi Flegri – the Flaming Fields of the Romans. There have been rumblings here since before Christ.’
Patch yawned suddenly with tiredness and old Leonardi, seeing him, felt tired himself. But for a different reason. Thirty years, he thought. Thirty years of interest in the mountain behind the town that had lost him all his money, involved him in lawsuits and dwindled his business to nothing, thirty years when he had ceased to be a prophet and become only an old crackpot of whom nobody took any notice any longer. He clicked his teeth ruminatively. No wonder Patch was yawning. They’d heard it all before. He’d been nearly right so many times, he thought the mountain played its tricks deliberately.
He put away the photographs and pottered off, clicking away, and as the door slammed, Patch and Cecilia sat over the coffee, saying nothing. The clacking noise had almost subsided now and it was quiet again outside except for the sound of people in the street. They could hear the chattering and even singing and the high shriek of Mamma Meucci, now turning to laughter. Then they heard the harsh voice of Bruno Bosco, the Communist candidate, who lived just down the hill. ‘Even the mountain’s protesting against Pelli,’ he said, and there was a burst of laughter.
Patch looked at Cecilia, remembering how when he had first arrived on Anapoli, the crater of Amarea had been a favourite picnic spot, and tourists had been in the habit of visiting it to see the thin jet of steam which escaped through a fissure in the rock. He had been taken there himself by Cecilia in the first weeks he had known her and had been entranced by the view and the loneliness and the colour – and Cecilia. She had been happy then, young and untouched by anger. This morose hostility towards him was something that had grown inexplicably in her over the last year.
Then he remembered he had taken Mrs Hayward too trying to capture some of the first magic, and had failed, and the trip had seemed only a dreary adventure, with Mrs Hayward complaining all the way back about the distance and the heat of the sun.
‘There’ll be no more Easter-Day picnics in the crater for a while, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Especially if there’s any dirt.’
‘There’ll be dirt,’ she said. ‘And eventually probably a lot more than dirt.’
He stared at his coffee-cup. ‘Cecilia,’ he said after a while. ‘Why do you believe there’s danger? Why now? Why this time? It’s happened before. Even this noise has happened before. Why didn’t you expect danger last time?’
‘Why? Why?’ Her eyes flashed angrily. ‘Why? Always why? You’re constantly falling over that word. It’s like a weight round your neck. Why should I do anything? Why must I worry? Why can’t someone else? And now, “Why are you afraid, Cecilia, when you weren’t a week ago?” I don’t know why I’m afraid now. I only know. I only know there should be an observatory on Amarea but there’s never been enough money to build one. I only know that in Italy there is never enough land to spare so that people have to huddle round volcanoes.’ She stood up, hugging her elbows. ‘If only there were someone with enough initiative to do something about it!’ She turned on him tempestuously ‘It only needs someone to ask to set everything in motion. It only requires one person to go and put the idea into the Mayor’s head. Just one. I’ve already asked Piero. He won’t do anything.’
‘Poor Piero,’ Patch said. It must have been baffling to the stiff, humourless boy, brought up as he was to expect respect from a future wife, to find himself saddled with a mutinous girl trying to break out from centuries of convention, a rebellious personality who was not prepared to accept courtship as he understood it, with
admiration for male virtues, to be followed by marriage with dutiful obedience.
‘Poor Piero,’ he repeated, with a certain amount of sympathy.
She turned on him. ‘Poor Piero!’ she said. ‘Sometimes he makes me afraid. I can see the whole of my life being walled up in Piero. He said that politics were not a woman’s concern. How long has Amarea been politics?’
‘I don’t know,’ Patch said. ‘But it could be that it is now.’
She began to pace up and down the room. ‘If only I were a man,’ she said. ‘If I were, I’d ask Pelli myself. Or Bosco. I wouldn’t care.’
Patch sighed, feeling old. In her youthful indignation, in her indifference to derision and her desperate seriousness, there was a rare vitality that seemed lacking in everyone else, and he was a little saddened by the thought that the same rebellion had died away in himself.
‘Cecilia’ – he leaned over and put down his cup – ‘does it occur to you that perhaps Pelli doesn’t want to know about the mountain? Perhaps Bosco doesn’t. It could make a difference to the voting if anything were said by them, if anything were done. In view of the nearness of the election, they probably feel they might be wiser to wait.’
‘Nobody would be that dishonest.’
Patch shrugged. ‘Let’s not call it dishonesty,’ he said tolerantly. ‘They’re business men. Their business is politics. They’ve got to take a risk sometimes and they probably think they can afford to take one now.’
‘Not with other people involved.’
Patch sighed, thinking how when he had been Cecilia’s age issues had seemed for him too a little too clear cut. Black must have been too black for him also, and white too shining bright. As he had grown older, he had begun to see there were greys.
‘Pelli’s not dishonest,’ he said. ‘He’s just being cautious.’
Cecilia gestured irritatedly, impatiently. ‘I still feel someone should demand some action,’ she insisted.
‘Cecilia,’ he said, chiding her affectionately. ‘Give ’em a chance. There’s only a week or two to voting day. I suppose they feel they’ve a right to get that over first. Surely, if the mountain’s done nothing of note since 1762, they needn’t worry for another two weeks.’
Cecilia turned fiercely towards him, a small angry figure, resentment flaring up inside her, sick with disappointment that she could persuade no one to do anything in this matter that so concerned her. The disgust for everyone’s indifference was an indigestible lump in her throat.
For a second as she stared at him, the room was in silence and Patch realised that practically all sound had already ceased from the mountain. The night outside was still and only the people now talking in the street disturbed it.
‘Have you read my grandfather’s books?’ Cecilia said, gesturing angrily towards the old man’s study. ‘All those books he has in there, about volcanoes and earthquakes?’
‘No.’
Cecilia’s eyes were bright under the heavy brush-strokes of her brows, ‘I have,’ she said. ‘They’re full of dead people who gambled on another two weeks.’
Twelve
Although the noise from the mountain had stopped when Patch woke the following morning, the commotion in the street seemed to have been going on all night. Nobody had wanted to go to bed and Patch had clung to sleep as though he were balancing on the edge of a precipice.
As he reluctantly let it slide away from him, he realised he could still hear Mamma Meucci’s shriek, though the singing had stopped and there seemed to be a louder note of alarm now in the babble below. Then he heard Alfredo Meucci’s voice and he wondered why he wasn’t off Capo Amarea attending to his lobster pots.
He was still in a half doze when Mamma Meucci pushed her way in with his coffee. Her face was ashen and slack and her cheeks shook as though she had malaria.
‘Signor Tom,’ she said as she put down the tray. ‘The Holy Souls in Purgatory have pity on us. It is the beginning of the end. There’s been a fall of ash on the slopes. If there’d been a wind, it would have been all over the town.’
Patch was sitting up in bed now. The atmosphere in the room seemed stuffy and made breathing difficult, and he was still half-asleep. He peered round him, trying to fight off the drowsiness, and gradually he became aware that the place was full of the dusky twilight that comes before sun-up, and he woke up abruptly.
‘God, Mamma,’ he said indignantly. ‘It’s still dark! What time is it?’
Mamma Meucci stood in the centre of the room, her hands to her face, her fingers outspread and pressing the flesh of her cheeks into rolls. ‘The Lord have mercy on us, Signor Tom,’ she said. ‘It isn’t darkness. It’s the mountain. It’s smoke over the sun. It’s dirt.’
Patch stared at her, then he jumped quickly out of bed and crossed to the window. Over the crater of Amarea there was a flat layer of grey cloud, clinging in the still air to the mountain top. Through its fringe, the sun gleamed in a dull yellow ball that was too weak to throw a shadow. The whole town seemed to be oppressed to an unnatural greyness.
‘That’s what the mountain threw out,’ Mamma Meucci mourned. ‘Meucci says an old man in San Giorgio was suffocated last night. He’d got ash dust in his mouth when they found him.’
When Mamma Meucci had gone, Patch dressed slowly and walked thoughtfully down the stairs to the street.
At the point where the Via Garibaldi debouched from between the crooked houses into the Piazza Martiri, a crowd had gathered, strung out in chattering groups towards the statue of Garibaldi. There was another large group of people outside Emiliano’s, standing among the orange trees and flowing under the arches of the Museo and into the barber’s shop where a man with a wet towel round his head was holding forth noisily to the other customers. Old Leonardi was prominent among the arguing, clicking and pointing with that odd pirouette of his like an aged ballet dancer as he gleefully prophesied disaster.
Around them the children who normally played in the piazza stood in a silent bunch, scared by the serious faces of the men, their angry voices and fierce gestures. Patch could see Cristoforo there, waiting a little to one side with his dog as he always did, big-eyed, tousle-haired and motionless, as he had often seen him on the mountain, as though he were listening for hidden sounds that were beyond the power of anyone else to catch. Over the group that was posed in a half-circle – as though set for a Rubens portrait, Patch thought – were the flat-fronted houses and beyond them the grey-blue cone of Amarea, silent now but brooding, a menacing, heavy-shouldered shape backgrounding the town.
Emiliano called from the crowd as he appeared, and pushed forward a young man with a taut, scared face, in a shabby black suit and a shirt without a collar, the dull brass of his stud showing at his throat. The big, dark eyes in his swarthy features showed the flat despair of a peasant faced with disaster. There was no resentment, merely acceptance, for disaster had been part of his heritage for generations, but there was something in his hopelessness that stirred Patch into wanting to help.
‘This is Marco Givanno,’ Emiliano explained importantly with a two-fingered gesture at the young man. ‘His father died last night in San Giorgio. You will have heard, I expect.’
Patch nodded, with a feeling of being caught up in some strange sort of nightmare. It seemed odd to be face to face with someone who had been suffering from the sly violence of the mountain at the very time when down in the Porto they had all been inclined to regard the noise more in the nature of a joke than anything else. It had a sobering effect on him, far more than the sight of that grey cloud of dust over the crater where the sun glowed through, peering like a short-sighted orange eye.
‘I think my father was dead when we found him,’ the young man was saying to Patch. ‘He’d been sleeping outside because of the heat. My brother Giuseppe and I brought him straight down here.’ He gestured at a ramshackle little green vehicle with sacking curtains by the kerb, and a bunch of gaunt men in overalls, and went on with a desperate appeal in his voice.
‘If you’ve any influence at all, signore,’ he said, ‘I beg you, in the name of the Lord Jesus who suffered on the Cross, to get to know what we are to do. In San Giorgio we have this dust falling all the time these days.’
The cloud of dust over the sun had cleared when Patch returned to the square later in the morning.
The crowd was still there but the Givannos had gone to arrange about the inquest on their father, and the core of the crowd was round Hannay who was haranguing an agitated Emiliano in an angry, frustrated way. He wore his uniform jacket with the four tarnished rings of his rank, grey flannel trousers and a grey felt hat. His face was scarlet with arguing and his eyes were blazing with excitement. He seemed to be trying to form some sort of committee to see the authorities.
‘Aren’t you afraid of that damned mountain?’ he was asking Emiliano as Patch approached.
Emiliano was staring back at him, his eyes large and troubled. ‘Signor Capitano, I’ve always been afraid of the mountain.’ He gestured with a fistful of whirling fingers under Hannay’s nose. ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve not yet got used to seeing the steam that comes from it.’
‘They say it’s smoke now,’ Hannay snapped.
‘Smoke then, signore. It’s all the same.’ Emiliano shrugged and let his hands drop heavily to his sides. ‘I’m as worried as you are. I think all the time of my bar. I build it with my own hands. I rebuild it after a landslide knocked down the rear wall and I rebuild it again after the war when a bomb blows in the front. Last night I listen to Amarea and I pray’ – his ready hands assumed the attitude of prayer – ‘I pray that I am not going to have to rebuild it again. If I could, I’d leave the island now.’
