Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘He said, why are we coming in this way? Why should we mind coming in through the front gate? I said, but don’t you like it, don’t you like the smell of the earth in here? Even the earth itself doesn’t smell of earth like the limonaia. He said, very good, we’ve come here to find out what the earth smells like. Where were you at lunch-time in any case? I told him I was at the farm visiting my cousin. Who is this cousin? I said he was Cesare.’

  ‘And then he flew off the handle again,’ said Barney. ‘I’m beginning to feel some sympathy with this man. Well, what next? For pity’s sake don’t tell me you had it off among the flower-pots.’

  ‘We went into the house,’ said Chiara. ‘I do wish there’d been time for you to see the Ricordanza. There’s nothing locked up inside, you just go up the stairs from room to room. The shutters were fastened, of course, so it was dark, you can’t think how dark, and yet it’s not absolutely dark either. You can just tell the difference between dark and pale. I rang you up from there, you know, Barney, that time.’

  ‘The hell you did,’ said Barney, flinging a pair of shoes into a suitcase. ‘Well, then I suppose you thought, what can I do to make him really happy?’

  ‘No, I didn’t think of anything at all.’

  Chiara looked composed and peaceful. ‘It was very good of you to come,’ she said.

  ‘Cha, just tell me. Just look me in the eyes and tell me this. Were the beds made up? I mean, were there proper sheets on them? After all, we’ve both of us got standards. I don’t want to be weedy, but we were both of us at Holy Innocents.’

  ‘Oh, Barney, of course we were. I shall never forget that.’

  Barney sat down squarely by her suitcase. ‘Well, I’ve come to the end of the road, Cha. I can’t give you any more advice, I’m not competent. I’ve been in bed with someone after a Hunt Ball, but we never got properly round to anything.’

  ‘Oh, Barney, I love you, you’ll always be able to give advice.’

  In the fifth form Barney had held them spellbound with readings from the sixteenth volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights, which she had selected from her grand-father’s library. ‘The pain which not a few newly-made women describe as resembling the tearing out of a back tooth.’ ‘What does he mean, “not a few”?’ Chiara had asked. ‘Did they all have their back teeth torn out?’

  ‘Okay, Cha, so you and this Dr Rossi are lovers.’

  ‘Not more than we were before.’

  ‘You’d met him twice.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference how often. Do you remember “Amor segnoreggio la anima, la quale fu si tosto a lui disponata”?’

  Barney looked at her gloomily.

  ‘I hope to God you’re not in pup.’

  34

  Cesare drove down to the tobacconist’s in the nearest village and bought four sheets of plain writing paper and an envelope. When he got back to Valsassina he sat down in his office and began to write a letter to Chiara. This began quite formally, saying that even though she had had to leave so abruptly it had been a great pleasure to see her a few days ago. He knew the number of days, but did not mention it. He thanked her for having the truck returned. This only took up a quarter of a page.

  He could have gone on to give her the news of the farm. Last year it hadn’t been practicable to make any Reserve, the special wine for the use of the family only, this year he thought it would be possible. Another thing: the day before yesterday, for no particular reason, he had gone just before sunrise to have a look at the doves and rabbits and found the casetta broken into. The door was still locked, but two panels had been taken out with an electric saw. It was clear enough that a lorry had been parked just off the track to the casetta and a little downhill, on the way to the field path. Although the ground had hardened after the recent rains the tyre marks, coming, turning and going, were quite plain to anyone who wanted to read them. Unlocking what was left of the door, Cesare had been half choked by the smother of torn fur and feathers that rose, in a white cloud, to meet him. Every cage was empty, the high roosts were down and stuck out like broken bones at odd angles. A few doves, with twisted necks, lay on the ground, perhaps surplus to requirements. The doves had probably been more intractable than the rabbits. Bernadino, on receiving the information, seemed to become a little unhinged. He demanded to go out immediately in the Land Rover to look for the rapinatori, or down to the Central Market in Florence where he was certain of being able to pick out, on the heaped butchers’ stalls, his own birds and animals all of whom he knew by name. The notion that all this had gone on a few hundred metres away, while he slept and dreamed peacefully, tormented him.

  Since Cesare had made up his mind about the Riservata, and had found it useless to argue with Bernadino, he saw no point in including these topics in his letter. However, he went on writing with increasing speed and concentration, until all the paper was used up.

  So far as he could remember, he had never written to her before. Probably there had been no necessity. When he had finished he read the letter through. Then he took the four sheets of paper, tore them into a number of pieces, and threw them away.

  ‘At least that’s something I haven’t done,’ he said aloud. It was irritating, though, to be left with the unused envelope.

  35

  Mazzata, Salvatore’s native village, was not beautiful and can never have been visited by anyone in search of beauty. A large tomato sauce cannery, intended to bring prosperity to the district, had been built under Mussolini’s scheme for the rehabilitation of the South, on the very slight slope to the north of the village. The factory was in the style of the temple at San Felice, and the sauce had been renamed Salsa Imperiale. Since there had never been any provision for maintaining it the cannery had gradually rusted, flaked and declined into a semi-ruin, a ruin without doors or windows, since these had been taken away over the years for other purposes. An inscription in painted lettering, MUSSOLINI IS THE MAN WHOM NEITHER GOD NOR MAN WILL BEND could still just be made out on one of the inner walls at the entrance to the workers’ recreation room. The last consignment of Salsa Imperiale, a long file of tins waiting, upside down, and full of sauce, for their bottoms to be soldered on, had been halted in that position in 1942. Ancient tins, ancient sauce and conveyer belt were all rusted together. Goats picked at the coarse flowers and straw-like grass between the fallen girders, and Mazzata’s children played there when they were turned off the flattened area which had once been the threshing-ground and was now the football pitch. Often their first experience of sex was a kind of dusty scuffle in the ruins of the managerial toilet block.

  There are many poorer villages than Mazzata in the South of Italy, but few more uninteresting. Salvatore, arriving unostentatiously by bus, spoke aloud to himself just under his breath, advising self-control. Everyone in Mazzata was going to behave exactly as he expected. He, too, was going to behave like a son of Mazzata coming back after making good in the city, wearing a grey suit and carrying a leather despatch case from Gherardini. If a documentary team from Radiotre were to arrive in Mazzata and make a call-out for a typical returning inhabitant, they’d pick him out in the first five minutes. The idea, or rather the fantasy, of anyone wanting to make any permanent record of Mazzata, diverted him a little as they approached the outskirts. It would be broadcast as one of the Documents of Science and Education, Number God knows what, and Gentilini would make the children listen to it in the crammed sitting-room. ‘With our eyes open and our hearts no less, our journey to the South will provide a good opportunity to know better the suggestive and historic settlement of Mazzata. Sheltered in the environs of an imposing ruin . . .’

  Salvatore had come back here to sell his share of the family land. He had decided to build a house outside Florence, with a garden, and a clinic standing detached from it. That would be better for the children. He would start building at once, before his marriage. The housing society connected with the hospital would give him a 2½% loan. This sale in Mazzata would provide his dep
osit. The Ridolfi would be asked for nothing. Like the greater part of the world’s population since the war he would be deeply in debt. But in expecting nothing from his wife’s family he would, he believed, put himself in an exceptional minority. His prospects were not at all bad. He could do what he had so far avoided, namely sign on to act as consultant for one of the larger insurance companies. He was almost certain of the neurology department at S. Agostino. Nothing was almost certain, of course. He allowed himself to think for a few moments of Chiara. The image which his mind supplied was of Chiara naked, dragging the unmanageable white duvet to the Ricordanza’s windows and almost helpless with laughter. Curiously enough it brought with it a sensation of purity and calm. This was not what he had expected, and it unsettled him.

  He knew exactly how opinions would divide, in the family and outside it, and at the Café Centrico in Mazzata. His brothers would impress upon him their reliance on his family loyalty and affection which would lead him to part with his share for something much less soulless than the market price. His elder sister would think him and call him an idiot for not being richer than he was. Married to the shoe-repairer, the stingiest and most intellectually dishonest man in Mazzata, she had only the experience of unhappiness to recommend her advice. After two days of discussion the shoe-repairer, who had got a little capital together by serving his time in the carabiniere, would indicate that he, together with some unknown partners, would be prepared to give rather more than the brothers for Salvatore’s few clods of earth. Then there was his mother. As always he had to ring through to the grocer’s shop and ask if someone could fetch her. It had taken her some time to come, even though she lived next door.

  ‘So you’ve made up your mind to come at last, when may we expect you?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘And you’ll bring this young woman with you?’

  ‘No, not this time.’

  ‘Is she educated?’

  Then, at the idea of his selling his part-share, she began to lament because now there would be nothing to bring him back to Mazzata. He pointed out, lowering his voice in the hope that she might lower hers, that it hadn’t ever brought him back anyway.

  ‘I only came to see you, and I’m coming to see you now.’

  ‘Promise me that she is of good family.’

  Her apparent failure to understand his letter was simply a demonstration of age and pitiable infirmity, and he had to remind himself that these would be added to her long-term demonstration of being a mother. There was no reason, by the way, why she should use the grocer’s telephone instead of having one herself. He had offered to pay for the installation, but in any case there had never been a time, as far as he could remember, when they wouldn’t have been able to afford one.

  It was the hottest part of the afternoon when the bus drew up in the main square. The bus, an air-conditioned Pullman on its way through to Benevento, looked incongruous as it came powerfully to rest alongside the downtrodden buildings. The only other vehicle in the piazza was a tricycle, supporting a glass case which contained biscuits of great age and packets of sweets. The tricyclist was absent, waiting until the children came out of school to make a sale. He had left his goods under the thick shadow of a plane tree, but the sun had moved and the sweets had begun to melt.

  36

  When, after two days’ negotiations, everybody concerned had said, both in turn and together pretty well what he had counted on, Salvatore felt better. There is a peculiar satisfaction in predicting one’s own difficulties. The matter of his forthcoming marriage was hardly discussed at all, because nobody in Mazzata had believed that what he had written to his mother was true. His engagement to a young Contessina was one of those fantasies which prove ruinous in political life, but are otherwise pardonable enough. They wouldn’t, to be sure, have associated fantasy with Salvatore, but if he had arranged a good marriage, why hadn’t he arrived in a new car? There was, for instance, the Giuletta Sports, of which only three hundred and twenty-three had been produced that year at Portello. The sale of the land, on the other hand, absorbed everyone, and circled round one stable point of agreement: since Salvatore had gone north, he deserved to receive as little money as possible. This, Salvatore found, was having an unfortunate effect on him. He was losing his temper, but not in the right way. He had a fierce impulse to terrify them all with generosity, to stand up in the Café Centrico and shout, ‘The land is yours! Rather than listen to one more word, I give it to you freely!’

  All business in Mazzata, until the adjournment to the lawyer’s office, was done at the large table at the back of the Café, situated in a kind of alcove of its own, under a large advertisement of the bygone Salsa Imperiale. But on the third afternoon Salvatore had hardly got further than the door when he heard his name called out gently, his childhood name, his name as a very small child indeed, Mickey. Even his mother would never think of using that name now. Perhaps, indeed, she was less likely to use it than anyone. The word, Mickey, irritated and embarrassed him and made him burn with resentment at the thirty-one-year-old body in which he was obliged to operate now, but at the same time he gave way to the indulgence we all feel for the child that we once were.

  He had an appointment with the shoe-maker, his sister’s husband, but he could see that no-one had arrived as yet at the back table, drowned in stifling darkness. Just at his elbow, at an inferior table concealed by the open door, the gentle voice continued.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t recognize me, your father’s friend.’

  A spectral figure, convulsed now by an irritating cough on a peculiarly high note, a tenor cough.

  ‘You won’t have forgotten my cough. It’s grown worse, I don’t take pride in it, but it hasn’t changed.’

  Salvatore had heard it as a small boy through the bedroom floorboards, punctuating the long conversations with his father which soothed him little by little towards sleep.

  ‘Pericle Sannazzaro. How are you, dottore?’

  ‘Not dottore.’

  ‘Ragionere?’

  ‘Comrade.’

  Salvatore embraced his father’s friend and sat down beside him. ‘I didn’t know you were still living here in Mazzata.’

  ‘Speaking with respect, of course you didn’t. You don’t know anything about me, why should you? I’m still a book-keeper, but now I’ve moved to Pantano. When I learned from your mother that you were coming, I availed myself of a lift from a business acquaintance of mine who travels in saucepans. Tomorrow is market day here, as always, that was why he was making the journey.’

  The precise explanation was certainly not intended as a reproach, but it acted as one. ‘That was very good of you, ragionere.’

  ‘I had a particular object in view.’

  Sannazzaro offered his cigarette papers and a nearly empty packet of Nazionale tobacco.

  ‘Thank you, I don’t smoke. But can’t I order you something?’

  At once Salvatore regretted his nervous eagerness. The offer shouldn’t have been made quite yet. In Florence he had lost the power of developing a subject with the proper delay and breadth of respect. But how much time, in duty to a dead father, must one waste on his faithful, coughing old friends?

  ‘So you’re making your career as a doctor, Mickey?’

  ‘Yes, as a neurologist.’

  ‘And it’s all going well?’

  ‘Not at all badly. You know how it is at the moment, things are getting better, production is up, the standard of living is higher, people are earning more money, and even the professionals have to benefit.’

  Sannazzaro said nothing, and he went on, ‘But I suppose it’s childish to talk of things getting better, as though we were simply carried along from one situation to another. The Italians are imposing their will on history a little, after all these centuries, that’s all.’

  ‘Not in Mazzata.’

  I know that, Salvatore thought furiously. Here I am at a disadvantage already with this frail old half-wit, with whom I�
�m sitting as a great favour, a favour to the dead.

  ‘A doctor,’ said Sannazzaro. ‘Give me your hand.’

  His touch was as cold and dry as a hen’s foot.

  ‘Let me hold it a little. Yes, the hand of a healer.’

  ‘I don’t know that we do all that much healing nowadays. The emphasis is on preventive medicine.’

  Sannazzaro ignored this, and replaced the hand on the table as though it was something precious. Salvatore, with intense irritation, removed it from the oil-cloth. He ordered a mezzo of wine and two bottles of mineral water. ‘Has it ever struck you,’ said Sannazzaro in a melancholy tone, ‘that the chances in life are not gone for ever, but that on the contrary they recur, so all that is asked of us is to recognize them? Of course, on their return they may not look quite the same. If you have ever watched floodwater going under a bridge you will have noticed that the flotsam is drawn irresistibly towards the dark arches, then vanishes, but if you cross over and keep an eye on the other side, it never seems to reappear.’

  He paused, to cough a little. Salvatore tried to rally him a little.

  ‘When did you ever see a river in flood?’

  ‘In the Po valley, with your father, when we worked in Turin.’

  The late afternoon card players were beginning to arrive, bringing a faint stir of activity to the stagnant Café Centrico. Pasquale, the proprietor, brought the mezzo of wine. Sannazzaro, ignoring it entirely, leant quietly forward.

  ‘Mickey, do you believe in eternal life?’

  ‘I was baptized, as you may possibly remember,’ said Salvatore. ‘I’m not sure that I want to discuss my present faith, or loss of faith, in these surroundings.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Why do you ask me?’ Sannazzaro couldn’t, surely, have heard of the absurd matter of the Inconsolabile.