He had taken to eating in the bar on the opposite side of the road. It meant, of course, walking down and up the stairs again and it was a singularly dull place, surely there must be better ones, but he couldn’t be bothered to look for them. Before he went out he opened Guardone’s envelope.
31
He had made no objection to her going to stay with these friends of hers, even when she had changed her, mind and declared in tears that it wasn’t possible for her to get well without seeing him every day, quite the contrary, he remembered that he had shouted, ‘I’ll pack for you, I’ll show you how to pack,’ and had begun to heap everything he could lay hands on, her photographs, her missal out of which bits of dried palm-leaves and holy pictures showered onto the floor, a heap of sandals with straps as thin as bits of string, all of them into her protesting suitcase. This had made her laugh, which was not what he had intended. He saw now that she had laughed because she had wanted him to believe that she was better already.
When he had read through Guardone’s draft document twice he understood with absolute certainty what was being done against him. He was able to grasp correctly everything that had happened since his marriage. It was even clearer if it was taken in order. He had been supposed to believe that Chiara, when she ordered those miserable dresses, had truly not known who Marta was, and that she hadn’t been taking pity on his little weaknesses, now safely over and done with. He had been supposed to believe that when that monstrous English girl came to stay with the Gentilini it was not a device to spread the news from one end of Florence to the other that he himself hadn’t provided a place fit for his wife’s friends. Now he was supposed to believe that the mad aunt, out of her own invention, was proposing to enter into some kind of contract to buy back the wretched twenty and a half hectares. Why should the mad aunt’s lawyer allow her to do any such thing? It was Chiara, who, having no money herself, had appealed to the Contessa, pedlar of the orphans’ wash-house. Chiara had been seized with the idea of surprising him with a toy, just the thing to keep him quiet, the unpredictable husband who disgraced himself at the Professor’s dinner-table, so hard-working, so clever, but too stupid after all to guess what was wrong with him and too crass to know that he was homesick, which accounted for his tiresome fantasies, homesick like a sucking infant but grossly satisfied when his handful of earth was given back to him. But he would hardly have thought it possible that at nineteen — even though she loved him, which of course gave her an unfair advantage — she would have known how to cut down a grown man.
He had stood with his father in front of the Quisisana Clinic, waiting for permission to visit, and outside the Ricordanza, pressing his forehead against the iron gates. The mistake, in both cases, had been to go inside. Of course, as a boy he had had no choice. There was only one thing to be thankful for, and that was that no-one had been there to see him on the day when he had so grotesquely hung about the Ricordanza.
32
Cesare was sitting at one end of the dinner-table at Valsassina, the same end as usual, doing nothing for the moment, and apparently thinking of nothing. The plates had been taken away. The radio was playing Monteverdi, which stopped and was replaced by a translation of Mrs Dale’s Diary. In the summer the doors and windows were never shut until Cesare locked up for the night. Anybody might walk in, and Salvatore did walk in.
‘You weren’t expecting me.’
‘No, but come in and sit down,’ said Cesare. ‘I heard the Vespa.’ He switched off the radio. Salvatore took a chair at the opposite end of the table. The presence of the other chairs oppressed him.
‘Do you always sit here in the evening?’ he asked, ‘I don’t think I could stand it here without company.’
‘Did you come here for company?’ said Cesare.
Salvatore looked at the violet night sky and back at the immovable table.
‘What I want to talk about can’t be settled without a second opinion. But, on the other hand, it can be discussed only within the family. I came here because it seems to me that you’re the only member of the Ridolfi family who can take a detached view of my case, and in fact I would say the only rational member at all.’
‘I should have thought that, whatever it is, you would do better to discuss it with my cousin.’
‘Chiara is very dear to me, but she’s not rational.’
‘I’ve known her since she was born. She’s quite rational enough for ordinary purposes.’
‘Is that how you think of her?’
‘I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘Nor do I. I appealed to you as a detached intelligence for quite other reasons. Don’t smile, I know that anyone who comes forty kilometres out into the country at night to see someone he knows only slightly is certain to want to talk about himself.’ Cesare did not smile, however. Salvatore went on, ‘You know my story, I started off without advantages, my father was a bicycle mechanic but not a good one, I studied medicine at Bologna, I did what I could, here I am. Would you consider me an unnecessary person?’
‘Doctors are necessary,’ said Cesare. ‘How many doctors, I don’t know.’
‘I should have added that we had some land, not much, and I myself had twenty hectares and a half, which I sold, I sold it when I thought the time had come to do so. You’ll understand that, I imagine.’
‘Well.’
‘Now I find that behind my back and without a single word to me Chiara’s aunt proposes to buy back the terreno and hand it over to me. I’ve only just been allowed to find out about it. Guardone sent the papers round to me at the hospital.’
‘You’re upset because my aunt, who has a good heart but isn’t altogether accountable, wants to make you a present of 20.5 hectares.’
‘I agree that your aunt isn’t accountable. Really, though, that was nothing to do with it. It’s Chiara who has arranged it.’
‘What makes you think she knew anything about it?’
‘How else could the Contessa know anything about Mazzata? No-one knows anything about Mazzata, still less about my 20.5 hectares. To Chiara I did talk about it. I told her almost everything about myself. Marriage is like the second stage of drunkenness in that respect. Tell me, can you see any other way that the aunt could have known about Mazzata?’
Cesare gave the question his usual serious consideration.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Chiara has no need of me whatever as I am. It would be absurd to blame her, I should have forseen it, but I’m not ashamed of taking it seriously, if I didn’t do that I should deserve what has happened to me. There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let’s say, in politics. To people like that a crisis of faith or trust is only a passing annoyance, or even a diversion. It’s no more important than finding you can’t afford to pay one of your bills for a month or two. I wanted to explain that I’m not like that. But unfortunately I’m a consultant, and I don’t know how to consult. I had a friend, who’s leaving Florence now. I used to talk to him. I realize now that I didn’t consult him either, I just told him where he was wrong.’
He looked past Cesare at the open doors each side of the great fireplace.
‘Does anyone else sleep in the house?’
‘Yes, Bernadino and the old woman.’
‘His wife?’
‘Yes, if she is his wife.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘At a guess, she’s saying the rosary in the kitchen. I don’t know where Bernadino is, probably shutting up the pigeons.’
‘It’s been dark for some time.’
‘It takes him some time.’
‘Have you got a gun?’
‘Of course,’ said Cesare. For the first time he took his two hands off the table.
‘I used to go out with my father when I was a boy, of course. We used to get up before it was light when the air was still fresh but quite often we couldn’t find anything to shoot, we’d walk for two hours and get nothing but a couple of thrushes or a lizard.
’ He added, ‘I need a shotgun now, the kind I had then, not an automatic’
‘I don’t keep anything in the house,’ said Cesare. ‘You’d have to come across to the office.’
‘Yes, but perhaps I ought to explain a little further what it is I’m doing. The main consideration is that Chiara and I are not able to accept each other, and I believe that on balance she would be better off without me.’
‘Don’t despair,’ said Cesare. ‘By my calculations, in twenty years there should be legal divorce in Italy.’
‘By what calculations?’
‘When the European Community gets going, we shall have to join to sell our wine, even though Germany is against it. Join them in one thing, join them in all.’
‘Do you think that your cousin ought to wait for twenty years to be happy?’ Salvatore cried ferociously. ‘To take a broader view, if I were eliminated the whole world situation would be shifted to a tiny degree, no more than that, no more than a grain of sand, for the better. That’s not only because there’s an incompatibility between love and the ways of showing it that are open to us. It’s also because I’ve come to think that it’s not impossible that at an early point in my life I took a wrong direction. That direction was a reaction against another one which was indicated to me by feeble and irritating people, sick people, failures, prisoners. However, as I’ve just said, it’s possible that as far as this country is concerned, and I’ve never lived in any other, I’ve become what might be considered from one angle a strongly growing organism and from another a deformity which can only be removed by surgical intervention. To turn to practical matters, I have an adequate life insurance with Previdenza, the beneficiaries of course are my mother and Chiara, but in the event of my suicide the company pays out nothing.’
‘That’s not in my policy,’ said Cesare.
‘Probably not, it’s occupational, Previdenza includes it only for journalists, doctors, artists, speculators and degenerates. It follows, however, that if I were to put an end to myself this evening, your evidence would be necessary as to its being an accident. What do you feel about this?’
‘On the whole I feel sorry for you.’
‘You wouldn’t try to prevent me?’
‘I don’t know.’
They went out together through the front door, acknowledging that this was a formal occasion of sorts. The night was pitch dark and starless, breathing relief after the disagreeable heat of the day, and like all country nights it was unquiet, with rustlings and creakings. The fragrance of the viburnum, which this year had flowered exceptionally well, followed them relentlessly round to the back of the house.
‘I’ll go ahead,’ said Cesare. ‘There’s usually something to fall over.’
The office was lit with a 40-watt bulb, which gave it exactly the same bleakness as it had by day. It looked just as it had done when Giancarlo came to discuss the arrangements for the wedding, except that the catalogues of agricultural machinery had disappeared under a new set of regulations from the Consorzio. The card announcing Chiara’s engagement was still on top of the desk.
Cesare opened the door of the cupboard, which was built into the thickness of the inner wall. The old dog, who had been napping in her corner, and was very well aware that the shooting season wasn’t due to open for another long stretch of existence, looked up at the cupboard with a flicker of hope. The end of her tail moved itself.
‘Well, you can see what I’ve got. Those on the top rack are my father’s Holland and Hollands. They were here for the whole of the war, no-one ever found them. They were made for him. I don’t use them. He shot from the left shoulder, so they were adjusted for that, and I don’t. That one below them is the one I use. It’s Italian. It belonged to my father too, but it wasn’t made for him. I’m taller than he was, so I had the stock lengthened. They had a job to get the right bit of walnut. You can hardly see the join.’
‘Certainly I can’t make it out,’ said Salvatore. ‘What about the shotgun?’
‘That’s just for the vermin, rats and snakes and so on.’
Cesare took it out, broke it open, loaded it, and handed it to Salvatore. The dog lifted her head and turned it slowly from one to the other of them.
Salvatore thanked him, and Cesare left him there and walked back again round to the front of the house. A very slight breeze was now getting up, as it often did at this time of night. He went into the entrance hall, leaving the doors open behind him, and as he passed the painted cassone, running his hand along the top, he heard the telephone begin to ring.
‘Cesare, it’s Chiara.’
‘Well, I know your voice,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m speaking from the Riomaggiore, from the Ricasoli house where I’m staying, it’s so good of them to look after me, but Cesare, Salvatore rings me up every evening and this evening he hasn’t, and I can’t get him at the flat, or the hospital, or at the Gentilini.’
‘Why should you think he’s here?’
‘I don’t, I’m just asking you what to do, come sempre.’
‘Well, he is here.’
‘He’s come to talk to you, he’s lonely, I knew it.’
‘I don’t know whether he’s lonely or not. He wanted a gun.’
‘But he never has a gun.’
‘I know, he wanted to borrow one of mine.’
‘But what for?’
Cesare considered a little, and said,
‘He said he was thinking of shooting himself.’
Chiara, so often misguided, so rarely knowing the right thing to do, now, by a miracle, did know. She said nothing at all. The unexpected silence had its effect on Cesare. After waiting a moment and finding that she did not ring off, he went out once again. He had meant to spend the evening in peace, sitting in his dining-room.
This time the corner of the back yard seemed to have sprung to life. There were disputing voices. The office door was still open, the weak light poured out, the dog, who never barked, who had not barked when Cesare’s father was killed or when the orphans arrived, was barking now. The disturbance was irritating.
‘Signor, dottore, that gun does not belong to you.’
Salvatore said something in a low voice, like a sufferer, and Bernadino cried, ‘It’s not his to give. If it was daylight, you would have to acknowledge that everything up to the north wall of the second olive grove is mine.’
Cesare stepped into the light, took the shotgun, broke it once again and unloaded it.
‘Salvatore, you’re wanted on the telephone. It’s your wife. She’s speaking from Riomaggiore.’
Salvatore threw up his hands.
‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Yes, we can go on like this,’ said Cesare. ‘We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’
Leaving Salvatore to go back by himself, he put the little gun into its correct rack. As soon as the cupboard door was shut the old dog settled off to sleep again. Bernadino disappeared, either into the large spaces of the country night or more probably to the kitchen entrance. Cesare put out the light and locked up. He didn’t mind tedium, he was trained to it, but it struck him that he didn’t want to walk in and out of his house any more on this particular night.
As he turned the corner Salvatore was coming into the courtyard to find his Vespa. He called out that he was going back to Florence and would be starting first thing in the morning for Riomaggiore.
If you liked Innocence, try these other Penelope Fitzgerald titles…
The Beginning of Spring
The Blue Flower
Human Voices
Offshore
The Means of Escape
The Gate of Angels
About the Author
PENELOPE FITZGERALD was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which — The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels — were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And she w
on the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.
A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers — a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers.
Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.
She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
Praise
From the reviews:
‘This is by far the fullest and richest of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels, and also the most ambitious. Her writing, as ever, has a natural authority, is very funny, warm and gently ironic, and full of tenderness towards human beings and their bravery in living.’
ANNE DUCHÊNE, Times Literary Supplement
‘Most novels nowadays look enormous, the size of 21b boxes of chocolates, and contain much wadding. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence is spare, the sentences do their work and cannot be skimped. Her dialogue sticks in the mind: asked if he is an intellectual, her hero replies, “Not at all . . . the sole task of the intellectual is to make people despise what they used to enjoy.”’
P.J. KAVANAGH, Spectator Books of the Year
Innocence Page 24
