The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  There was a thud behind her as the church door closed, then slow footsteps along a far aisle. Janet being Janet had not sat somewhere up the nave but off to one side in the shadow of a pillar; any visitor would at once believe themselves alone. Soon came a murmur from a distant confessional. Other lives in progress, she thought, whereas hers…. A billow of familiar irritation and anxiety swelled upwards from her viscera, crushing her lungs a little. The dreary stagnation, the awful sense of irredeemable time slipping always. Forty-five in September and nothing to show for it but the unmistakable signs of ageing. No husband, no lover, the same librarian’s job in the same Oxford college for twenty years. True, there had been affairs – especially Teresa, always and forever Teresa – and, true, there had been holidays abroad, the odd experiences and minor adventures which were inescapable for anybody not actually screwed into an iron lung. She had been caught in an avalanche and had been trapped on a rotting medieval roof of oolite shingles for half an hour by a fire in her college and she had once had a series of ever-more-menacing and crudely drawn notes pushed under her Egyptian hotel door followed by the blade of a knife through the door. But now they had happened (and she had long since felt self-disgust at dining out on them) they were finished, over, past and done with. It was as if they had happened to somebody else entirely, leaving no apparent residue in her own life. So now it was perfectly possible for that intestinal billow to lurch up and make her unable to stop the thought: ‘I haven’t lived. And soon I’ll be dead.’ But what would it take to stop it? What inconceivably transfiguring affair, experience, belatedly discovered talent or whatever?

  At moments when she was better defended against the billows – most of the time, actually – she could be realistic, even cynical about herself. She did it, as any other sane and observant person did, by looking at those about her and absolutely failing to detect much difference in their own lives, still less anything very enviable. Even the ones with families agonised and were secretly miserable, although they all worked hard to maintain that outward grimace of pleasure, that inward censorship so they could later say with such self-pleased worldliness, ‘Oh, we had our ups and downs, didn’t we, William?’ or ‘Of course kids are a real pest much of the time but just occasionally’ – pause for effect – ‘one of them says or does something that makes it all worth it a million times over.’ And, well, yes, it filled the time. But other than that they had not lived in Bokhara, either, nor had an affair with an entire string quartet, nor been in an aeroplane which was hijacked. They paid mortgages and school bills and phone bills and once in a while one of them would publish the book she or he had been working on for nigh on fifteen years: Coleridge’s Thought and the German Philosophical Tradition or Kinship Systems among the ’Utuwâ.

  What, then, was it which produced the sudden bursts of upset and restlessness? What is it, Catullus? Why do you not make haste to die? Janet stared up at the ceiling, which, her eyes having adjusted to the dimness, she could now see had been nastily restored with a vault of bright blue plaster. Her gaze wandered downwards to the wall across from where she sat. There was a marble plaque surmounted by a plaster wreath containing a portrait of the head and shoulders of a young man wearing some sort of military jacket. Peering closer she could see the picture was actually a photograph which had somehow been glazed on to the surface of an oval porcelain tablet. The process had resulted in an excellent cameo likeness, very sharp, but in sepia tones like a daguerrotype. The text beneath read:

  IN RESPECTFUL AND EVER-CHERISHED

  MEMORY OF LIEUTENANT FRANCO

  CIAPPI, INTREPID AND DEDICATED

  ITALIAN AVIATOR, WHO THROUGH A

  SUDDEN FRENZY OF NATURE YIELDED

  CONTROL OF HIS MACHINE INTO THE

  HANDS OF GOD, CRASHING WITH

  TERRIBLE FORCE INTO THE ROOF OF

  THIS CHURCH JANUARY 12TH 1932,

  AGED 23.

  HIS GRIEVING COMRADES AND BEREFT

  PARENTS, HIS BROTHERS AND SISTER

  ALL WEEP FOR HIM, THOUGH IN THE

  SURE FAITH THAT HE WILL RISE AGAIN.

  She got up and crossed over to look more closely at the picture. It was a wonderfully handsome and sensitive face, luxuriant hair (surely it had been a glossy black?) brushed straight back, in all very much resembling the pianist Dinu Lipatti. Now, there, she thought, was a way to go. What to everybody else had been merely a sharp squall sending them scurrying across the slippery cobbles into warm cafés and shops had been, a thousand feet above, a fatal frenzy of nature for the lost boy in his Fiat or Caproni. It was right: it didn’t much matter how you lived as long as you died well, and young Franco, buffeted and blind in his rain-streaked goggles, had died with splendid drama. She wondered if he had come right through the ceiling, whether the nave she sat in had been littered with masonry and pieces of alloy and fabric, filled with the stench of burned castor oil and aviation spirit, the perhaps headless body in its flying jacket bundled into a corner near the battered engine which ticked as it cooled. Or had it stuck in the roof so that only the bent propeller and cowling protruded through a ragged hole above the altar, hot streams of glycol and blood and hydraulic fluid pattering among pyx and plate?

  The crash in its various forms and possibilities had now become completely vivid to her. If she walked round the church and really looked closely, might she not find other evidence for that event of January 1932? A chipped flagstone, perhaps. Or maybe if the dirt between the flagstones could be analysed there would still be traces of burned oil or haemoglobin. And then it struck her: 1932 was the very year her mother and Dorothy had been here in this city. True, they had come a bit later, in summer. But now the photograph Janet could so clearly visualise in her mother’s album took on new interest. Mumbo had sat on that fountain railing five months after young Franco had done his death-dive a few hundred yards away. Merely a coincidence, of course, without the least significance. Still, the mind turned it over.

  She stood there with her mouth open seeing and not looking at the plaque while pigeons cooed and the muttering in the confessional went on and on as if some penitent were pouring out their whole life-story. She had the conviction that she herself would never form part of anybody else’s history. That was what old photographs did so mercilessly: they reminded you of other people’s continuities. ‘We had such lovely times…. We used to laugh so much.’ But you had to have somebody to show them to. It wasn’t enough just to go around snapping pictures. Janet knew plenty of people who took photographs, but in general she could swear that, once they had come back from the developer’s and had been pored over with amusement, they were practically never looked at again. Had it not been clear only that morning that her mother had no idea she’d ever been to that piazza before, still less been photographed there? When had she last looked at her own album? Come to that, when had she last taken a photograph? All her hoarded pictures seemed immensely old, many of them still pushed into the wallets of long-defunct chemists now marked with the rust of pins and staples. What, then, had it all been for?

  ‘Darling Janet, what you need is a camera.’ Mumbo had said it time and time again. ‘They’re such fun.’ And time and time again her daughter had refused as if she knew that what and where she had been were more likely to return to mock her than to console. It was as if she had always known that nobody would ever show pictures of her to their children: Janet the good sport (why, she wondered, did cars no longer have running-boards for good sports to put one foot up on?); Janet who was such a dear … you couldn’t help laughing when Janet was around…. Oh, but you could, actually; you could very easily help it because she was sharp and angular-minded and serious all at once and could deflate you with the same bleakness with which she could deflate herself. Permanently deflated, that’s what she was, and when she came into contact with the world it seemed inexorably to follow suit. And it was not what people liked at all, she knew, but neither could she help it. She just saw things discomfortingly.

  ‘Si
gnora scusi.’ She turned to the quiet voice behind her. An elderly priest with thick grey hair brushed straight back and wearing a black cassock greenish with age stood there watching her. Funds, thought Janet. He’s soliciting for the poor of the parish, the upkeep of the organ, for himself. ‘Forgive me, signora,’ he continued in his soft Tuscan accent, ‘but I could not help noticing your attention. You have been looking at this memorial for ten minutes or more. I hope you will not think me impertinent if I ask you what there is about it which so holds your interest?’

  ‘Really I was daydreaming,’ she admitted, smiling. ‘Did I look stupid? I have my mouth open when I daydream; I’ve often been told.’

  ‘Of course not, signora, no, no.’

  ‘I thought so…. But, yes, I was interested in the plaque. It’s an incomplete story as it stands, but it’s unusual to find oneself on a spot where someone once died so dramatically.’

  ‘Certo. Are you perhaps a writer?’

  ‘I’m a librarian.’

  ‘Ah. It must be wonderful always to be surrounded by the wisdom of the past.’

  ‘Not a bit. You’ll doubtless think me mad if I say that sometimes when there is so much evidence of where and who one wasn’t it makes it that much more difficult to discover where and who one is.’

  This made the priest look at her quite sharply. ‘May I ask, is this your first time in our city? Not in Italy, of course; you speak the language too well.’

  She explained that she was accompanying her elderly mother on a sort of nostalgic grand tour before she became ‘too decrepit to travel, like an Egyptian king’ – Mumbo’s expression, not her own.

  ‘How interesting,’ the priest said. ‘I was born only ten miles away and I’ve never left the area, but it must be an experience to return to distant places one knew fifty years before. I’ve seen everything here evolve gradually so I can scarcely remember how it used to be. Except this church.’

  ‘Before the aeroplane crash?’

  ‘Exactly. I see you’ve put two and two together. Did you see the postcards?’

  ‘No?’

  The priest led her to the main door. Just inside was the sort of table she habitually ignored with its freight of prayer-sheets, notices, collection boxes, magazines about the work of missions in Uganda. There was also a pile of sepia-tinted postcards.

  ‘This is how it was,’ he said, handing her one. The interior of a Renaissance church, its features oddly shaped and shadowed by the floodlights which must have been used so as to bring out the chancel ceiling which, as far as she could tell, had been magnificently painted.

  ‘Fra Benedetto della Croce,’ explained the priest. ‘One of the two best ceilings in this part of Tuscany. It was utterly destroyed.’

  Janet had the unstoppable thought: brilliant boy.

  ‘Poor Franco. Had he known what he had done he would have been devastated. An exquisite treasure of the Tuscan quattrocento.’

  ‘You sound as if you knew him.’

  ‘He was my brother,’ said the priest simply. ‘His action that day has shaped all my days since. There is a shame in the story which is not written quite plainly there on the wall. Come’ – he took Janet’s arm – ‘let us sit down for a minute. There seems to be nobody else since that unhappy woman wishing to confess their sins to me, so let me do a little confession of my own. I hope I don’t presume, signora?’

  Without waiting for a reply he led her back to her original seat by the memorial tablet and she sat down again, although not without thinking very briefly of her mother and wondering if she were asleep.

  ‘I expect you noticed, signora, that the word “glorious” does not occur in the text? But it is asking too much from a foreigner, even one so perfect in our language. These memorials are often written in a kind of code from which much may be deduced by one who knows. Now, if the word “glorious” had appeared in Franco’s inscription, it would be commonly inferred that he had died on active service if not actually in combat. But his memory, we are told, is to be respected merely.’

  ‘The shame you mentioned?’

  ‘Precisely. The truth is that, far from being on active service, poor Franco had actually stolen the plane.’

  Splendid boy. ‘Stolen?’

  ‘More or less. He was a pilot all right and in the air force, but he had been grounded as a punishment for some misdemeanour…. I’m sorry to say it was insubordination.’

  She glanced sideways at the priest and surprised a fond smile of recollection somewhat at variance with his words. More and more splendid.

  ‘It was a terrible January day. Right from the Alps – Milan, Bologna, Florence, even as far south as Perugia there were blizzards. So what does Franco do? Naturally, he decides it is exactly today he must go and see his girlfriend near Siena. There is a military airfield near to her at Campobasso so he will take a plane, hop across, spend the afternoon with her and hop back again. Hopping, you see, although it is a hundred and twenty-eight kilometres to Campobasso and the same back. Open cockpit, zero visibility, instrument-flying and dead-reckoning.’

  ‘And youth,’ said Janet.

  ‘That above all. A flask of coffee but five litres of hot blood. Dio benedetto. So he takes the aircraft and tells the ground crew to fill the tanks but not to warm up the engine since of course he doesn’t wish to alert anyone in authority. The ground crews…. Well, in those days the pilots were like knights, you know, so dashing and glamorous; they only had to put one boot in a stirrup and the flight engineers would fall over themselves to fettle up their chargers. So there they are at Pratosammartino, the officers, standing around in the flight operations room drinking their coffee and staring out of the windows at the snow when suddenly across the airfield comes this sound of an aeroengine starting. Nobody pays much attention: engineers taking advantage of the weather to do some servicing. Then it grows and grows. It can’t be…. Everybody in the room is at the window now…. It is. Some crazy lunatic is taking off and no one can even see him the snow flurries are so thick. He roars overhead; he is gone. The squadron leader rushes to the telephone and cranks the handle furiously. But he’s off and away, my elder brother Franco. A complete lunatic but with great charm. People adored him.’

  The priest was still smiling fondly, then shook his head at Janet’s question: ‘Did he make Campobasso?’

  ‘No. He was right on course, right on course. But they think the altimeter was wrong; perhaps it hadn’t been reset. He became confused, maybe he came down a little to see if he could spot a landmark….’ Unconsciously the priest glanced up at the roof. ‘They said later it was inexplicable how he could have hit this church. There are so many higher buildings all around it: the dome on the Basilica, for example, or the towers of San Sebastiano or the Palazzo Tradescanti itself. But, no’ – was there a note of pride? – ‘Franco had to destroy himself and Fra Benedetto’s masterpiece; it was destined that he should. So he did. The whole ceiling, the entire roof came down.’ The arm in its sheened black made a descending gesture. ‘Franco was killed at once. They found his body in the organ loft. By the grace of God there was nobody in the church at the time, but an old sacristan died of a heart-attack when he heard the news. I was seventeen at the time and already studying for the priesthood. Can you imagine what it was to be the younger brother of a boy whose youthful prank had gone so disastrously wrong? All Italy had heard of him by the next morning; think of it. The jokes of semi-admiration from my own peers: “How irresponsible, how Italian…. How beautiful was she, this girlfriend? I bet she was worth some boring old painting, anyway. And you already stuck in the seminario, Marco. Did Franco have all the balls in the family?” All that was bearable. But the weighty regret of their elders, the artistic world, official opinion, that was truly terrible. And in a way it still is, although it’s now just part of history. At the time the newspapers were full of phrases like “tragic and irreparable loss to our cultural heritage and to the world of art”. Nowadays if you read guidebooks or art books there is
usually a single reference to Fra Benedetto’s masterpiece “The Raising of Lazarus” as “destroyed”. There are plenty of old photographs of it, of course; copies and sketches and colour reproductions. But the original is gone, just like poor Franco there.’

  Janet could hardly take her eyes from the young man’s cameo face. How innocent it was; how ironic that in dying he should have become a famous iconoclast.

  ‘I felt the shame very much. I was confused, crushed beneath it, our family’s shame. There was even for a while a new verb, “ciappiare”, which meant to destroy something of far greater value than yourself. For three years this church stood in semiruins, open to the sky while they haggled over whose responsibility it was and how it should be restored. So what could I do but beg my superiors to let me take it over, to make it my life’s work to repair the damage, to do something to make amends? And so I have.’

  ‘No more guilt?’

  ‘None,’ said the priest. ‘It was all more than half a century ago, you must remember. Franco to me is a few childhood memories and that photograph on the wall. I have no connection, either, with the teenager I was in those days. “My life’s work” as I called it then did not have the same meaning as my life’s work does today, with most of it behind me. Nowadays this church just feels to me like the place I have always worked in.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Janet said untruthfully.

  ‘Isn’t it? There was no point trying to restore the original roof or re-creating the painting, so I decided on this. It’s simple, that vault. It’s clean and blue like the sky. In fact to me it’s a better memorial than that plaque on the wall. Besides, I couldn’t raise enough money for anything more elaborate. This was almost all done with donations, you know. Nowadays, of course, it would have been restored as a perfect replica; no sum too great to lavish on a Renaissance church with a priceless ceiling. But this was then….’