by Morris West
‘But he knew about the others?’
‘I think so.’
‘You laughed about that, I remember, dottore. You made a joke about your daughter putting horns on a foolish husband. You said she was following in her father’s footsteps, you were proud of her conquests, and her cleverness.’
‘He is a fool,’ said Ascolini bitterly. ‘A sentimental young fool who didn’t know what time of day it was. He deserved a lesson.’
‘And now?’
‘Now he’s talking of leaving me and setting up his own legal practice.’
‘And you don’t approve of that?’
‘Of course not! He’s too young, too inexperienced; he’ll wreck his career before it’s half begun.’
‘You wrecked his marriage, dottore; why should you care about his career?’
‘I don’t, except that it involves my daughter’s future, and the future of their children if they have any.’
‘You’re lying, dottore,’ said Ninette Lachaise, sadly. ‘You’re lying to me. You’re lying to yourself.’
Surprisingly, the old advocate laughed and flung out his hands in an almost comic despair. ‘Of course I’m lying! I know the truth better than you do, child. I made a world in my own image and I don’t like the look of it any more, so I need someone to break it over my head and make me eat the pieces.’
‘Perhaps this is what Carlo is trying to do now?’
‘Carlo?’ Ascolini exploded into contempt. ‘He’s too much of a boy to control his own wife. How can he compete with a perverse old bull like me? I would like nothing better than he should ram my nonsense down my neck, but he’s too much a gentleman to do it!…Eh!’ He shrugged off the discussion and walked back to take her hands in his own. ‘Forget all this and go paint your pictures, my dear. We’re not worth helping – any of us! But there’s one thing-’
‘What is it, dottore?’
‘You’re dining with us tonight at the villa.’
‘No – please!’ Her refusal was sharp and emphatic. ‘You’re welcome here any time, you know that, but keep me out of your family. They’re not my people; I’m not theirs.’
‘It’s not for us, it’s for yourself. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s my house-guest. His name’s Peter Landon. He’s a doctor and he comes from Australia by way of London.’
‘A barbarous country they tell me, dottore, full of strange animals and giants in shirt-sleeves.’
Ascolini laughed. ‘When you meet this Landon for the first time you may be inclined to believe it. He fills a room when he walks into it. When he talks it seems brusque and too certain for politeness. Then you realize that he is talking pure Tuscan, and that what he says makes a deal of sense, and that he has lived more variously than you or I. There is a strength in him too and, I think, a touch of discontent.’ He laid an affectionate hand on her cheek. ‘He could be good for you, my dear.’
She flushed and turned away. ‘Are you turning matchmaker, dottore?’
‘I am more fond of you than you know, Ninette,’ he told her soberly. ‘I should like to see you happy. Please come.’
‘Very well, dottore, I’ll come, but you must promise me something first.’
‘Anything, child.’
‘You will play no comedies with me, no plots like you make with your own family. I could never forgive you that.’
‘I could never forgive myself either. Believe me, Ninette.’ He took her face in his old hands and kissed her lightly on the forehead. Then he was gone, and she stood a long time looking out over the roof-tops of the town to the tumbled hillsides of Tuscany, where the wine is sweetened by the blood of ancient sacrifices and the cypresses grow out of the eyes of dead princes.
At the Vila Ascolini, perched high on a terraced hill above the village of San Stefano, Valeria Rienzi was drowsing behind closed shutters. She had heard no bells, no shots, no echo of the tumult that followed them. The only sounds that penetrated her room were the bourdon of the cicadas, the clip-clip of a gardener’s shears and the pale, plangent music that Carlo was playing in the salone.
She had no thought of death this summer noon. The beat of her blood was too strong for such dreary irrelevance. She had only to flex her long body on the bed, twitch the silk robe against her skin, to feel the sweetness and the itch of living. She was in fact thinking of love, which she understood as a pleasant if transient diversion, and of marriage, which she recognized as a permanent, if occasionally irksome, condition.
Marriage meant Carlo Rienzi, the handsome, boyish husband playing his sad piano below stairs. It meant discretion, public propriety, a matronly care for her husband’s career. It meant a surrender of liberty, an expense of tenderness which she rarely felt, demands on a body which Carlo had never understood how to waken, exacerbation of a spirit too wilful and too lively to match his melancholy and uncertain temperament. Marriage meant Rome and Roman rectitude – legal dinners and cocktail parties for those who handed fat briefs to her father and his fledgling son-in-law.
Love, in the context of a summer holiday in Tuscany, meant Basilio Lazzaro, the swarthy, passionate bachelor who made no secret of his fondness for young wives. Love was an antidote to boredom, an affirmation of independence. It was a rich joke to share with an understanding father, a goad to prick a too youthful husband into man’s estate.
At thirty, Valeria Rienzi was prepared to count her blessings: good health, good looks, no children, a manageable husband, an urgent lover, a father who saw all, understood all and forgave everything with a cynic’s indulgence.
It was a pleasant contemplation in the warm, private twilight of her bedroom where painted fauns and dryads disported themselves on the ceiling. There was music whose sadness touched her not at all. There was a promise of a whole summer’s diversion, and if Basilio proved too demanding there was the visitor, Peter Landon. She had not measured him yet, but there would be time enough to test this fellow from the New World in the devious, sardonic games of the Old.
And yet…and yet…there were uneasy ripples on the Narcissus pool, dark currents stirring under the lily-pads. There were changes in herself which she did not fully understand – a sense of emptiness, a demand for direction, a compulsion to new and more passionate encounters, vague fear and occasional poignant regret. Time was when conspiracy with her father assured her of absolution for even her wildest follies. Now it was no longer as absolution but a kind of wry-mouthed tolerance as though he were less disappointed in her than in himself.
He made no secret now that he wanted her settled and breeding a family. The problem was that he still had no respect for Carlo, and could show her no way to restore her own. What he demanded was a new conspiracy: seduction of a husband made indifferent by the indifference of his wife, a loveless mating to bring love to an old epicure who had affected to despise it all his life. It was too much for too little. Too little for her, too much for him – and for Carlo one deception too many.
Time was when he had pleaded with her for love and for the fulfilment of children. Time was when he would barter the last shreds of pride for a kiss and a moment of union. But not now. He had grown older these last months, colder, less dependent, more absorbed in a private planning of his own.
Part of it he had told her. He was determined to leave Ascolini’s office and set up his own practice in advocacy. This done, he would offer her a home of her own, a household separate from her father. Afterwards? It was the afterwards that troubled her, when she must stand alone, without buttress, without absolution, subject to the verdict of a wronged husband and the determination of her own turbulent desires.
This was the nub of the problem. What did one want so much that the wanting was a torment in the flesh? What did one need so much that one was prepared to reject all else to attain it? Twenty-four hours ago she had heard the same question from the unlikely lips of Basilio Lazzaro.
She had been standing at the door of his bedroom, fu
lly dressed, with gloves and bag in hand, watching him button a shirt over his brown barrel-chest. She had noted the slack satisfied ease of his movements, his swift indifference to her presence, and she had asked, plaintively: ‘Why, Basilio - why must it always be like this?’
‘Like what?’ asked Lazzaro irritably as he reached for his tie.
‘When we meet it is like the overture to an opera. When we make love it is all drama and music. When we pan it’s… it’s like paying off a taxi.’
Lazzaro’s dark handsome face puckered in a frown of puzzlement. ‘What do you expect, cara? This is the way it is. When you drink the wine, the bottle’s empty. When the opera’s over, you don’t wait around for the cleaners. You’ve had your fun. You go home and wait for another performance.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘What else can there be, cara? I ask you – what else?’
Which was a neat riddle, but she had found, then or now, no adequate answer. She was still puzzling over it when the ormolu clock sounded a quarter after midday, and it was time to bathe and dress for lunch.
The square of San Stefano was seething and populous as an ant-heap. The whole village was out, babe and beldame, crowding about the house of the dead man, chaffering round the fountain, arguing with the doltish policeman who stood guard at the door of the station. There was nothing riotous in their behaviour, nothing hostile in their attitude. They were spectators only, involved by curiosity in a melodrama of puppets.
From the window of his office Sergeant Fiorello watched them with a canny professional eye. So far, so good. They were excited but orderly, milling about the square like sheep in a pen. There was no danger of immediate violence. The detectives from Siena would arrive to take over the case in an hour. The family of the murdered man was absorbed in a privacy of grief. He could afford to relax and attend to his prisoner.
She was sitting, slumped in a chair, head bowed, her body shaken with rigors. Fiorello’s lean, leathery face softened when he looked at her, then he poured brandy into an earthenware cup and held it to her lips. She gagged on the first mouthful, then sipped it slowly. In a few moments the rigors subsided and Fiorello offered her a cigarette. She refused it and said in a dead, flat voice: ‘No, thank you. I’m better now.’
‘I have to ask you questions. You know that?’ His voice, for so burly a man, was oddly gentle. The girl nodded indifferently.
‘I know that.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘You know it already. Anna Albertini. I used to be Anna Moschetti.’
‘Whose gun is that?’
He picked up the weapon and held it out to her flat in the palm of his hand. She did not flinch or turn away, but answered simply: ‘My husband’s.’
‘We’ll have to get in touch with him. Where is he?’
‘In Florence. Vicolo degli Angelotti, number sixteen.’
‘Is there a telephone?’
‘No.’
‘Does he know where you are?’
‘No.’
Her eyes were glazed; she sat bolt upright in the chair, pale and rigid as a cataleptic. Her voice had a formal, metallic quality like that of a subject in narcosis. Fiorello hesitated a moment, and then asked another question: ‘Why did you do it, Anna?’
For the first time a hint of life crept into her voice and eyes. ‘You know why. It doesn’t matter how I say it, or how you will write it down. You know why.’
‘Then tell me something else, Anna. Why did you choose this time? Why not a month ago or five years? Why didn’t you wait longer?’
‘Does it matter?’
Fiorello toyed absently with the pistol that had killed Gianbattista Belloni. His own voice took on a brooding, reflective quality, as if he too were re-living events remote from this place and this moment.
‘No, it doesn’t matter. Very soon you will be taken away from here. You will be tried, convicted and sent to prison for twenty years because you killed a man in cold blood. It’s just a question to fill in time.’
‘Time…’ She took hold of the word as if it were a talisman, key to a lifetime’s mysteries. ‘It wasn’t like looking at a clock or tearing pages off a calendar. It was like – like walking along a road…always the same road…always in the same direction. Then the road ended…here in San Stefano, outside Belloni’s house. You understand that, don’t you?’
‘I understand it.’
But the understanding had come too late – and he knew it. Sixteen years too late. The road had swung full circle and now, like his prisoner, he was stumbling over milestones that he had thought past and forgotten. He laid the gun down on the desk and reached for a cigarette. When he came to light it he found that his hands were trembling. Ashamed, he stood up and busied himself laying out bread and cheese and olives on a plate, pouring a glass of wine and setting the rough meal in front of Anna Albertini. He said gruffly: ‘When they take you to Siena you’ll be questioned again, for many hours probably. You should try to eat now.’
‘I’m not hungry, thank you.’
He knew that she was in shock, but her passivity angered him unreasonably. He blazed at her: ‘Mother of God! Don’t you understand? There’s a man dead a couple of doors down the street. You killed him! He’s the Mayor of this town and there’s a crowd outside that would tear you in pieces if someone spoke the right word. When the black-suit boys come from Siena they’re going to fry you like a fish in a pan. I’m trying to help you, but I can’t force you to eat.’
‘Why are you trying to help me?’
There was no malice in the question, only the vague and placid curiosity of the ailing. Fiorello knew the answer only too well, but for the life of him he could not give it. He turned away and walked again to the window while the girl sat picking at the food, aimless and pathetic as a bird which has been caged for the first time.
There was a flurry in the street now. The little friar had left the house of the dead man and was hurrying towards the police-station. The people pressed about him, tugging at his habit, besieging him with questions, but he waved them away and stumbled breathlessly into Fiorello’s office.
When he saw the girl he stopped dead in his tracks and his eyes filled up with an old man’s impotent tears. Fiorello said baldly: ‘You know who she is, don’t you?’
Fra Bonifacio nodded wearily. ‘I think I guessed it the first moment I saw her in the square. I should have expected all this. But it’s been such a long time.’
‘Sixteen years. And now the bomb explodes!’
‘She needs help.’
Fiorello shrugged and spread his hands in a motion of despair. ‘What help is there? It’s an open-and-shut case. Vendetta. Premeditated murder. The penalty’s twenty years.’
‘She needs legal counsel.’
‘The State supplies that to needy prisoners.’
‘It’s not enough. She needs the best we can find.’
‘Who pays, even if you can find someone to handle a hopeless brief?’
‘The Ascolini family is staying at the villa for the summer. The old man’s one of the great criminal advocates. At least I can ask him to interest himself in the case. If not he, perhaps his son-in-law.’
‘Why should they care?’
‘Ascolini was born in these parts. He must have some legal loyalties.’
‘Loyalties!’ Fiorello vented the word in a harsh chuckle. ‘We have so few of our own, why should we expect them from the signori?’
For a moment it seemed as if the little priest would accept the familiar proposition. His face sagged, his shoulders drooped. Then a new thought engaged him and when he turned back to Fiorello his eyes were hard. He said quietly: ‘There is a question for you, my friend. When Anna is brought to trial, how will you testify?’
‘On the evidence,’ said Fiorello flatly. ‘How else?’
‘And on the past? On the beginning of this monstrous business?’
‘I stand on the record.’ Fiorello’s face was blank, his eyes cold a
s agate-stones.
‘And if the record lies?’
‘Then I am not aware of it, padre. I’m paid to keep the peace, not to rewrite old history.’
‘Is that your last word?’
‘It has to be,’ said Fiorello with odd humour. ‘I can’t hide myself in a cloister like you, padre. I can’t afford to go beating my breast and making novenas to Santa Caterina when things don’t turn out the way I’d like. This is my world. Those folks out there are my people. I have to live with them the best way I can. This one …’ he made a curt gesture towards the girl – ‘whatever we do, she’s a lost cause. I suppose, anyway, that makes her the Church’s business.’
Seconds ticked away as the two men faced each other, priest and policeman, each committed to his separate road, each caught in the consequence of a common history, while Anna Albertini sat a pace away, pecking at her food, remote and contained as a moon-dweller. Then, without another word, the old friar turned away, lifted the telephone and asked to be connected to the Villa Ascolini.
In the noonday quiet of the salone, Carlo Rienzi was playing Chopin for the visitor, Peter Landon. They made a curious pair: the burly Australian with his freckled, quirky face and his ham-fist clamped round the bowl of his pipe; the Italian, slim, pale, incongruously beautiful, with sensitive lips and a dreamer’s eyes touched with mystery and discontent.
The piece was one of the early nocturnes, tender, limpid, plangent, and Rienzi was interpreting it with simplicity and fidelity. The notes fell pure as water-drops; the phrases were shaped with love and understanding – and with no slur of bravura or false sentiment. This was the true discipline of art: the submission of the executant to the composer’s talent, the subordination of personal emotion to that recorded by the long-dead master.
Landon watched him with shrewd, diagnostic eyes and thought how young he was, how vulnerable, how oddly matched with his cool, civilized wife and the flamboyant old advocate who was his master in the law.
Yet he was not all youth, nor wholly unscarred. His hands were strong yet restrained on the keys. There were lines on his forehead and incipient crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes. He was on the wrong side of thirty. He was married. He must have suffered his share of the exactions of life. He played Chopin like one who understood the frustrations of love.
