Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Giancarlo couldn’t remember what his sister had been like in their childhood. Remote though it was, she must, surely, have been like something, but never, he thought, like me.

  Perhaps, at the moment, sitting in the second floor flat of the decrepit palazzo, in a salon full of marble statuary, as yellow as old teeth, but with a freshness in the light from the river only a street away, they were doing no more than talking things over, as others do. What distinguished them was their optimism. Even disagreements between them produced hope.

  If Chiara was to marry this Doctor Rossi, where was the wedding lunch to be? They had thought, of course, of the Ricordanza. It was true that at any celebration there Annunziata would be an absolute nuisance. Insanely cautious, she insisted that any guests from Rome (with the exception of the Monsignore), or indeed from anywhere south of the Umbrian border, were likely to need watching. Before and after they left she counted the spoons in a raucous whisper. That had happened, for instance, when Giancarlo, with the idea of raising money on the property, had given a lunch party at the villa for some Roman bankers. But the scheme had been likely to fail in any case. Giancarlo was not the kind of person who ever made money. He should have applied himself harder to his business studies in Switzerland.

  But then it turned out that Chiara didn’t, while deeply anxious not to distress anyone, want her wedding to be at the Ricordanza. ‘Where she used to play all morning!’ Mad exclaimed, ‘in the shadows of the lemon trees.’ It seemed, however, that Dr Rossi wasn’t in favour of it. But surely Chiara had a will of her own?

  ‘Of course she has,’ said Giancarlo. ‘That is why she is able to change her mind.’ And it became clear to them that Chiara wanted a country wedding. ‘That means the farm. I shall go out to Valsassina and talk to Cesare about it myself. He won’t know what’s going on, it won’t have occurred to him to ask. I shall go to Valsassina tomorrow.’

  4

  The Count, holding himself well but stiffly, walked down to the palazzo’s courtyard. The ground floor was let out to shops (one of them a hairdresser’s) and small offices. The cortile was thronged with parked cars and scooters. Bicycles were always carried indoors and upstairs for safety’s sake by their owners. Two horses belonging to the mounted police stood patiently, for long stretches, tethered to iron stanchions let into a marble pillar. In the fourteenth century the whole area had been a graveyard for unbaptized infants, whose salvation was doubtful.

  With relief the Count got into his solid old Fiat 1500 sedan. The hollowed leather of the driver’s seat fitted his sharp joints. Reluctance to start, small items out of alignment, a rattle which might or might not be something to do with the ashtrays, were no trouble, rather a consolation to a driver who recognized them all.

  He drove out of the city on the via Chiantigiana. In tune to the persistent rattling, he reflected that his wife, who was not dead, but preferred to live in Chicago, and Maddalena’s husband, who was not dead either, though he was sometimes thought to be, but preferred to live in East Suffolk, must both receive invitations to the wedding, but would not accept them. On the other hand the Monsignore must be asked to officiate, and would officiate, though this would have to be by courtesy of the parish priest at Valsassina. The country, as the Count drove on, the gentle inclines, the olives, vines, and vegetables, suggested that the earth here was still friendly and even protective to human beings, but it had been rewarded in every vineyard with forty-five thousand white concrete posts to the hectare. This did not disturb Giancarlo, who forgave the land its changing appearance as he forgave himself his own.

  That year they had a cold autumn. At Valsassina there was a bitter smell from the straw fires which had been lit at night to keep the earth warm. Two of Cesare’s little motocultivators were rolling in procession back and forth across the ridge. The Count marvelled, not for the first time, at how much of the agricultural day consists of moving things from one place to another. He passed the little stone building, once a chapel, which the farmworkers used for their mid-day break. The ragged roof steamed like a kettle, they were boiling something up in there. Higher up, a stone cross marked the place where Cesare’s father had been shot during the German retreat, or possibly during the Allied advance, there was no chance now of ever knowing which, or what he had been trying to protest against.

  At the top of the rising ground Giancarlo parked in the front courtyard, where it was always supposed to be warmer (but this was a fiction) and as he got out of the car the autumn wind was waiting for him. A lizard which had emerged, as wrinkled as an old man’s hand, into what looked like warm sunshine had retreated instantly. The whole of the right-hand wall was covered with a climbing viburnum, spreading upwards and outwards as it always had done within living memory, as far as it could reach. This plant had had the sense to begin shedding its leaves early.

  Valsassina itself was somewhere between a farmhouse and a casa signorile and was sometimes admired for its original plan, but in fact it had been put up almost at random on the site of an old watchtower. Once inside, you always had the same sensation of no-one being there, a cavernous emptiness, with a faint sound of something dripping, and darkness, not pitch darkness but a reddish dark between the brick floors and the terracotta tiles of the ceilings. Immediately to the right as you went in was the fermentation room for the house wine. The powerful odour of saturated wood travelled from one end of the house to the other. From here, also, came the sound of dripping. Straight ahead was the dining-room, with a massive fireplace of pietra serena.

  ‘Cesare!’ shouted Giancarlo. Then he remembered that his nephew kept Wednesdays for office work.

  The dining-room was as dark as the hall, the shutters were up against the sudden cold. But the outlines of knives and forks could be made out, and two substantial white napkins on the old immovable dining-table. The napkins meant that he hadn’t telephoned in vain, he was expected. A door at the farther end opened, letting in the clear autumn light, and an old man appeared, making some kind of complaint, interrupted by an old woman who asked the Count decisively what kind of pasta he wanted her to cook. ‘I can’t hear both of you at once,’ said Giancarlo. The man, Bernadino Mattioli, was, he knew, subject to mild delusions of grandeur. Cesare might well be glad to be rid of him, but as Bernadino had nowhere else to go that would be impossible. How can my nephew live here like this, he thought, a young man on his own? They say that every man in his heart wants to die in the place where he was born. While he was considering this — he had been born in the bedroom directly above the room where he was sitting now — Bernadino approached him.

  ‘I have something to say which Your Excellency will find strangely interesting.’ The old woman interposed again. It turned out that there were only two possibilities for mid-day lunch, green tagliatelle or plain.

  ‘Any decision must be in the nature of a gamble,’ said the Count, ‘we will have green.’ She retreated towards the kitchen and her voice could be heard calling out to what had seemed to be a deserted house. ‘They want the green!’ Giancarlo thought, I have to be back in Florence by half-past four for a committee meeting of the Touring Club.

  At the back the two wings of the house lost their pretensions, and turned into not much more than a series of sheds. Beyond the back courtyard were deep and ancient ditches, planted with fig trees and vegetables, all cut back this year by the wind. The last shed to the left looked, from the pulley above the loft, as though it had once been a small granary. This was the office. There Cesare could be seen, sitting absolutely motionless and solid in front of two piles of papers. When a shadow fell across him and he looked up and saw who was there he rose to his feet, and fetched the only other chair, stirring up a smell of poultry and old dust. The Count lowered himself onto it, exaggerating his fragility, as a kind of insurance against ill-chance. Cesare sat down again, turning away from the desk towards his uncle.

  The desk, an old walnut piece, looked abandoned and pitiful, as furniture always does once it has been put out
of the house. The brass keyplates were missing and the handles had been replaced by pieces of string through the screw-holes. ‘That desk wasn’t out here in your father’s day,’ said the Count, almost as though he had forgotten this until now. But since in fact he had mentioned it a number of times, Cesare made no reply. He never said anything unless the situation absolutely required it. Conversation, as one of life’s arts, or amusements, was not understood by him, unless silence can be counted as part of it.

  For a good many years the Valsassina estate had been engaged in a legal petition to decide the exact location of its vineyards. When Cesare or his late father mentioned the tragedy of 1932, they were not thinking of the fate of the eleven university professors who refused in that year to take the Fascist oath. They meant that in 1932 the authorities had declared Valsassina to be just outside the boundary line of the Chianti area. This meant that none of the Ridolfi wines could be labelled or sold as classic, and their market value was reduced by a quarter. The calculations, however, had been made from the position of the house itself, whereas some of the outlying vineyards fell inside the boundary. They had deteriorated, it was true, and could possibly be described as abandoned, but Cesare was doggedly negotiating for a low interest loan to buy a new digger, which would make replanting with sangiovese grapes possible in a short time. Those borderline fields might then be readmitted as classic. It was a letter from the local Consorzio on this subject, and another one from the bank, that were planted on the desk in front of him now.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ Cesare said.

  Unquestionably it was. The high windows had been designed so that the sun would never strike through them, and there was no heating in the room except a small charcoal stove. The Count was glad that he was wearing his old military greatcoat, which still fitted him very well. In a few months’ time, under the Baistrocchi army reforms, the Italian cavalry would be gone for ever. When he had heard this he had silently resolved to be buried in his coat. Cesare, however, spoke as though he had only noticed the cold for the first time. His uncle stretched himself out towards the stove and as he grew a little warmer his breath became visible.

  ‘Cesare, I’ve come to talk to you about Chiara’s wedding. You know, of course, that she’s going to marry this doctor.’ The ‘this’ wasn’t quite right, he corrected himself to ‘marry Dr Salvatore Rossi’.

  There was a pause, which gave him the feeling of having spoken too quickly. Cesare then said, ‘Chiara came out here a month or so ago. She didn’t stay long.’ The Count wondered if this was a complaint, although it hardly sounded like one. Chiara ought to come as often as possible, if only because a twelfth of the estate had been left to her by her uncle, Cesare’s father. It wasn’t that the estate business didn’t interest her, it did, and she was very quick at getting the hang of the accounts.

  ‘Life seems an eternity to a girl at school,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know what it feels like to be a girl at school?’ Cesare asked, apparently with deep interest.

  ‘Well, I can imagine that now she’s finished with it she wants to stay in Florence and, I suppose, to meet different kinds of people.’

  ‘That she evidently did,’ said Cesare.

  The Count tried again. ‘We were a little surprised, you know, not to hear from you. We sent you the announcement of the engagement, of course, I’m sure.’

  He could be quite sure, since he could see the card standing all by itself on the light powdering of dust and cornmeal which covered the desk. Cesare followed his glance and said, ‘I don’t let them disturb the things in here.’

  He got up, and his uncle at once understood that they were going to look at something or other on the property. Either Cesare thought this a necessary formality, or he wanted to turn over in his mind what he had just heard. The Count found that he had to check himself from making the kind of gesticulations with which people insult the deaf and the dumb. Meanwhile a section of the darkness in the far corner of the office detached itself and was seen to be a gun-dog of the old-fashioned rough-haired Italian breed. She shook and stretched herself, as a preparation for going out. It was like the action of wringing a dish-mop.

  The idea that his uncle had driven out from Florence to discuss something quite else seemed not to disturb Cesare. Perhaps he gave him credit for being able, if he came to the country, to behave as if he lived there. Outside, the ragged sky burned like a blue and white fire, hard on the eyes. Everything, as though at a given signal, was leaning away from the wind or struggling against it.

  They walked, not to the vineyards but along a cart track to a hillside planted as far as the horizon with olives. The ground beneath the trees had been ploughed up for potatoes, and the two of them had to go along side by side, but at the distance of a furrow apart, one foot in and one foot out; really, it would have been easier for someone with one leg shorter than the other. The tail of the old dog could be seen moving along the furrow at Cesare’s heels. For some reason the Count, who was reflecting that he was too old for such outings, felt more at ease when he was walking at a higher level than Cesare, who at last came to a halt.

  ‘The Consorzio think we ought to get rid of the olives and sell them for timber. There’s all kinds of cheap cooking oil now.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The fattore, who must have been following them, now came up in absolute silence and joined Cesare between two lean old trees. Cesare bent down and picked up a handful of stones or earth or both, sorted them out in his palm and showed them to the fattore, who nodded, apparently satisfied. Then, noticing the Count, he wished everyone in general good-morning, and retreated down the slope. At the bottom he got onto his bicycle, adjusting a sheet of corrugated iron which he had been carrying on the handlebars, and pedalled slowly away. The wind caught the flapping edge of the iron with a metallic note, repeated again and again, fainter and fainter. The dog, crouching, followed the sound with sharp attention, hoping that the sound might become a shot. And yet when I was a boy and lived here I was impatient for every morning, the Count thought. And Chiara was always clamouring to come out here, ever since she could totter about after Cesare.

  When they got back to the house the shutters had been drawn back in the spacious lavatory which had offered its row of green marble basins and urinals to shooting parties in the days of Umberto I. The shutters were drawn, too, in the dining-room. From daily habit Bernadino had grouped the oil, the salt, the pepper and the bread round the master’s place, so that he could help himself at top speed and get back to work, while the Count’s chair was drawn up in front of a barren expanse of table. When they sat down Cesare, without embarrassment, began to redistribute everything, while Bernadino, apparently propelled out of the kitchen, brought in the dish of pasta, its sauce freckled and dappled golden from the oven. The heat and fragrance seemed out of place in the astonishing cold of the room. Cesare began to break off pieces of bread and throw them into his mouth with unerring aim, then drank a little Valsassina. The wine, in the Florentine way, was not poured out for guests, who were expected to help themselves. The Count, whose digestion was not always reliable, pecked and sipped. How large my nephew’s nose is! he thought. How large his hands! From this angle he reminds me of someone quite outside the family, I think perhaps Cesare Pavese, with those brilliant eyes, not grey, not green exactly. The large nose makes him look kindly, and I know that he is kindly, but he doesn’t get any easier to talk to. In the Inferno the only ones condemned to silence are those who have betrayed their masters, Brutus and Judas in particular. Dante must have thought of them, before their punishment, as chatterers, or even as serious conversationalists, always first with the news. But, in Cesare’s case, what if he were condemned to talk!

  He pulled himself up. No one knew better than himself what difficulties Cesare must have, face to face with the bank, the Consorzio, the tenants and the stony and chalky ground, whose blood was a wine which was not permitted to be l
abelled classico. If his nephew were to be asked, either by divine or human authority — either on Judgement Day or by the redistribution committee of the local Communist party — whether he had made good use of his time, the answer, if Cesare could bring himself to make one, must surely be yes.

  The old woman appeared, and remarking that the fire should have been lit long ago put a shovelful of hot charcoal under the dry lavender and olive roots on the hearth. The warmth of the blaze spread courageously a little way into the room and the Count lost the connection of his thoughts, found himself repeating aloud, for no apparent reason, ‘If we could buy children with silver and gold, without women’s company! But it cannot be.’ At the same time the dog, who had been huddled underneath the table, sensed that the next course was coming and sprang convulsively to its feet. This jerked him back to attention.

  ‘The point is that Chiara wants a country wedding, here at Valsassina. I came here, I’m afraid, principally to talk about money. We could have done that on the telephone, in fact money is the only thing one can talk about successfully on the telephone, but then . . . in any case, the expenses of the whole thing would of course be mine. The details, I suppose, aren’t for you and me, but there are some caterers that Maddalena favours because she says they make pastries for the Vatican, such folly, we know that the Pacelli pope is looked after by German nuns who would never allow him to eat pastry from Florence.’ To his annoyance Bernadino, platter in hand, bent over him at this point.