by Joseph Hone
‘I’ll tell you why!’ I sat forward, full of his old certainty and attack, which he’d lost. ‘I believe you, and what you say about her, the madness or whatever, because I’ve got to know you as well as anyone could this last month. Stuck on that barge for weeks, chained together, practically sitting on that damn lavatory together, and all your nonsense talk and the rows. All the good things of you – the evening at the lock with the midges when you did that sketch of me, and when we hugged in the hunting lodge, thinking it might be the last hug of our lives, and we said how we smelt of lemon and vanilla, and a lot more. Apart from making love no two people could have been closer. And I’ve been just as difficult with you. We’ve seen absolutely the best and worst of each other. So I’m in a damn good position to tell you that – there’s much more of the best than the worst in you. And she didn’t want to see that.’
‘But …’
‘So why can’t you just accept the fact that she treated you like dirt?’
‘Because I loved her.’
I leant back from him. ‘And threw that away. For no good reason, as far as you were concerned. Seems she was determined to chuck love out of her life, in any case. You were just the excuse.’
‘Maybe.’ He started to fiddle with his glass, downcast. ‘Well, all right, but I have to get rid of this heavy-handed remembering of everything I did with her.’ He looked up at me. ‘It’s a kind of torture. I must have lived so intensely with her, so that once I start thinking about her now, every detail, every place we did things, comes back to me … pubs where we drank and inns we stayed in, places in the Cotsworlds I can’t drive by now without a bad jolt of memory. Particularly there’s Carrara.’
‘So don’t go back there again.’ I was sad for him. I wanted to help him wipe out those painful memories. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I have just the same feelings about Martha. Bad jolts of memory, seeing places where we’d done things together in New York. It stops you in your tracks, knowing you’re never going to do anything with her again.’
I wished I could go to Carrara with him, now. All the more since he’d given up on all those hopeless emotional ideas about me. He’d dropped the Modi nude, and we’d escaped all our pursuers. We had money, we were free. I could go with him to Carrara.
He raised his glass, took another quaff, smiled at me, and looked away over the bandstand, froth all over his lips. The polka was done. Now ‘The Gold and Silver Waltz’. Joy in this miraculous summer afternoon overwhelmed me. The elegance of the gardens, the chilled beer, the food, the music. Free, where all the rightness of life was ours again. In profile now, the low sun glinting on his hair, looking away into the distance, alone with his jolts of memory, he wiped away the froth from his lips. And in that gesture, that instant, I knew I had to go to Carrara with him. I had to help him get through the desert of love, just as I had to help myself get through it. Why not do it together?
So I said, ‘Yes, those memory jolts, Ben, I know them too well. I’ll come with you. We’ll go to Carrara together and lay those two ghosts of Katie and Martha together.’
He’d turned, and now he raised his glass. ‘Thank you,’ was all he said, but his smile said a lot more. He was no longer alone with his desperate memories, and I wasn’t either, and the waltz played on, and the world seemed even better than it had a few minutes before.
We booked a flight to Pisa for the following day.
We walked about Carrara, and late in the afternoon sat outside a café in one corner of the Piazza Alberica, gazing up at the sharp green peaks towering above the far end of the square. The air was cool after the heat on the coast, the crush of tourists, the stifling rail journey from Pisa.
Ten miles above the sea, in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, the town was as fine as the air. The cobbled baroque square, the Malaspina palazzo to one side, a colonnade on the other, narrow medieval alleys running off it, one to the last of the old town gates, which gave onto a bridge over a frothy river, white from its bed of old marble fillings and chippings, flowing down from the quarries somewhere high above us. A town where just about every building was made of the pure-white, the creamy, or the greyish-veined hues of the local marble.
‘It’s really something,’ I said to Ben, leaning back in my chair, revived now by the beauty of the piazza and a double espresso. ‘Not a tourist in sight.’
‘They stay down in the hotels at the marina, the beaches, the discos. You only get the serious marble types here in Carrara town – like the ones we saw back at the hotel, those rich Saudis; that American architect. They’re fussy, and won’t buy down at the marble yards at the port. They have to see it up at the quarries, choose their own blocks, like Michelangelo when he stayed here.’
‘You’ve seen the quarries?’
‘Just the ones you can see from the road, by the village of Colonnata, six miles up, where the road ends. Katie and I went one day. Most of the quarries are even higher, off the road: you have to make an appointment.’
‘And your father’s quarry?’
‘Don’t know exactly where it is, but it was one of the oldest, not far from Colonnata. Of course it’s owned by another company now, but we’re not worrying about that any more.’
‘No.’
‘We could just sit here for a few days, a bit more of the Baroque, coffee and Campari sodas, then hire a car and go over the mountains into the Tuscan olive groves.’
‘So why not right now? And before that you can show me where you lived with Katie that week.’
‘It’s just around the corner, past the cathedral, sharp left and into the Via Plebiscito.’
At that moment we heard the sound of an orchestra strike up from somewhere away to the right of the square. Ben looked at his watch. ‘Six o’clock, Saturday evening. The town band. They play most weekends in summer.’
We left the café and walked around the corner, into Ben’s past on the Via Plebiscito.
‘There’ he said, ‘That’s the flat we had, second floor, with all the red geraniums pouring down over the balcony.’
And there it was, a beautiful three-storied baroque house, in a terrace that lay along the narrow sunken street below the gardens. We stopped beneath the chestnut branches, the trees leaning over a high wall from the gardens of the piazza above us, which we couldn’t see, but where the bandstand was, with the town band blowing and fiddling away.
‘It’s the overture, La Traviata,’ he said. ‘Just like last time.’
He turned to me beneath the shadowy leaves, excited, but not in his usual way. There was a harshness in his face. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘Just about now, around six, when I’d finished my classes – back there at the Academia delle Arte – I walked back this way, and she’d usually be up on the balcony, reading or writing or dozing, and I’d call up – you see that half-basement to the house, the sign cut in the marble above the door? Vini – it’s a little bar. So I’d call up and say “What about a half litre?” And she’d come down –’ He stopped, suddenly.
‘Well, what about it?’ I said. He turned and looked at me, puzzled.
‘What about what?’
‘A half litre.’
It was strange watching someone relive the very instants of their past. The man in front of me was living two lives at the same moment. A little flea-bitten terrier, with a lame back leg, was sitting in front of the doorway of the Vini. It barked as we approached.
‘The bar dog, Toto,’ Ben said. We went through a bead curtain, down some stairs, and into the bar. It was small, and very cool, a real workers’ bar. Some old men at the back, arguing loudly, with tiny thimble glasses of vino in front of them.
‘It’s all right,’ Ben said, listening a moment. ‘They’re not really fighting. It’s just about the local football team.’ I sat down at an empty table by the door and he went to get us the half-litre. A fat and rather sour-looking woman presided behind the long marble counter, with huge bottles of unlabelled red and white wine behind her, but she was jolly when she saw
Ben.
‘Ah, Signor Contini!’ They shook hands. I couldn’t follow the rest of her effusive greetings. My Italian was ropey and she spoke with a heavy accent. Ben returned with a cloudy yellowish wine and two thimble glasses.
He raised his glass, we drank. It was the roughest wine I’d ever tasted.
‘You get used to it,’ he said. ‘Especially when she brings the titbits.’ He smiled.
I said, ‘Yes, I remember all that titbits stuff in Killiney. This is so much better.’
The big woman who’d gone to the kitchen returned with our snacks: two doorsteps of white bread, saucers of raw anchovy, chunks of parmigiano crudo, shrivelled black olives, half a lemon and a corked carafe of fresh, bright-green olive oil.
‘See – the titbits!’ Ben, leaning back, just looked at the food, the wine, the oil, making no move. ‘But no funerals here.’
The band had stopped, but now it started up again. ‘Overture, Il Trovatore,’ Ben said. We could hear the music quite clearly and I noticed how some of the old football fiends, while arguing, had started to tap the beat out, unconsciously, on the marble tabletop. As familiar with Verdi as they were with football.
Toto came to sit by us, ears pricked, head to one side, quizzical. Ben gave him a crust. Then he laid out some anchovies on a hunk of white bread for me, squeezed some lemon on the fish, cut up some of the cheese on it, then put his finger on the snout of the olive oil carafe and flourished a sprinkle over the whole concoction. He passed it over to me, a real doorstep. Then he did all the arranging on the bread for himself, looked at his creation, quizzically, then took the plunge. Opening his mouth as wide as he could, he forced the bread between his jaws. There was no other way to do it. It was a grotesque sight.
Can you fall in love with a grotesque sight? I did, as he munched and I watched the last of the slippery, oily fish disappear between his lips. I looked down at my own doorstep, and couldn’t touch it. I’d fallen in love with a raw anchovy slipping down someone’s throat. It felt absolutely right, the sudden fluttery thing in my stomach. The only strange thing, I realized a moment after, was that the someone’s mouth was Ben’s, a man. I was so surprised I couldn’t look at him.
Seeing my downcast expression, he asked, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ I looked up at him. ‘Those anchovies – just not hungry any more.’
‘Well, don’t worry, I’ll eat them,’ he said, ‘and you can have something proper later on. There’s a really good fish restaurant round the corner.’ He looked worried. ‘You’re okay, aren’t you?’
‘Just lost my appetite. I’m fine.’
He ate half my doorstep, and we left and walked up to the tired public gardens, with their dusty paths and heroic statuary and fountains. The white-globed lamps had come on in the twilight. I put my arm in his as we walked towards the bandstand. They were belting through Aida now, ‘March of the Slaves’. We stopped to listen and look – a tiny sweating conductor in tails, punching them through the loud march. It was exciting. I squeezed his arm. He didn’t return the pressure, just kept nodding his head slightly to the music. A week before, or at any time during the last month indeed, had I squeezed his arm that way he would not have been so indifferent. At least, when we walked on to the restaurant, he didn’t look back at the balcony flooded with red geraniums, where Katie had sat and waited for him.
We had separate rooms in the Hotel Michelangelo, but next door to each other, so that wasn’t going to be a problem: and nor was the fact that I hadn’t made love with a man for fifteen years. Lovemaking is not something you forget.
There was nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns, as it were, so that towards the end of the meal in the fish restaurant, out on a terrace, and after grilled swordfish with a creamy caper-and-lemon sauce, and a good bottle of some Tuscan estate white, I wiped my lips, looked across the table and said lightly, ‘Ben, let’s go to bed together.’
He was still prodding about among the debris of his swordfish, moping up the sauce with a bit of bread. The peasant. He looked up. There was no surprise in his face, just humour.
‘My God, I know seafood is supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but this is ridiculous. You mean … you really want to?’
‘Yes.’
Silence. He looked puzzled.
‘You don’t seem too certain.’
‘No, I was just wondering if we might have a sambuca? I can light the coffee beans on top and keep the midges and mosquitoes off.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘They’re getting at my ankles.’
‘Have to rub a bit of lemon on them, that’s the best. Here, I’ll do it for you.’ He got up quickly, with half a lemon, bent down, squeezed the juice over my ankles, massaged the pulp in with his fingers. The juice pricked my skin, and his fingers were warm and firm, and my toes started to tingle.
You can’t talk about lovemaking afterwards. Not if it really is that. The words get stuck in your throat, in the moments of it, and afterwards. What to say but that we made love, as famished people. And in our hunger we had banished the ghosts of Katie and Martha.
Next morning I thought we were about to embark on a spell of pure happiness, the olive groves over the mountains, God knows what other good things, for to have made love as we did that night was to forget the past, be careless of the present and sure of the future.
Sex is salvation, I thought – the sheer well-being, that happiness – salvation until, waiting in the lobby to speak to the manager about hiring a car, a small, almost bald man in an old-fashioned linen summer suit and red hanky in his breast pocket came into the lobby. He was carrying a bubble-wrapped parcel under his arm. Two younger, tough-looking men followed.
‘My God. O’Higgins,’ Ben said, walking up to him. I thought he was going to hit him. He might have done, but for the men with him. Instead he said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
The man gestured to the parcel. ‘Your property I think, Mr Contini. We found it on the barge, along with a scrapbook and a diary of some sort. I was sure you’d want them back.’
‘The barge on the Rhine? How did you come to find out about that?’
‘Ah, that would be telling. It’s you who’ll do the telling now.’ We sat at the far end of the lobby. O’Higgins sipped a coffee, still holding the Modi, guarding it carefully on his lap, the two men sitting nearby.
‘But how did you trace us here?’
‘A hunch,’ O’Higgins said easily.
‘A hunch? Out of all the places in Europe, why Carrara?’
‘Your friend’s diary,’ he said beaming. ‘We found it on the barge.’ He turned to me. ‘With a drawing of you in it, and I read some of the diary.’ Of course, he thought I was Katie. He turned to Ben. ‘I thought there might be a clue in the diary as to where you’d gone.’ He looked back at me again, sipped his cappuccino. ‘And there was.’
‘What was there?’ Ben was fuming.
‘An account of a time you both spent here in Carrara some years ago, happy times it seems, while you were teaching at the art school. So I played the hunch. I thought – well, lovers, you know – and knowing how much of the romantic there is in you, Mr Contini – I thought you might both have come back here. Renewing happy memories.’ He beamed.
‘You’re a shit, O’Higgins.’
‘That’s harsh, Mr Contini. When I’m here to give you your property back. The Modi nude. Worth millions, I’m sure.’
‘I’m not interested in that now. Given it all up.’
‘Well, that’s all right for you painters, you can go on and do new work. I’ve not given it all up, and can’t afford to in my business. Have to rely on past artistic work. Especially great works of art – paintings by Raphael, drawings by Dürer and so on.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Those paintings.’ The little shit narrowed his eyes. ‘They must be hidden somewhere round here, maybe in one of your father’s old marble quarries, and you didn’t come here to renew happy memories – you
came here to find them. It was suddenly all clear to me when I saw the mention of Carrara in your friend’s diary. Because of course your father was in the marble business in Dublin. So he must have known about quarries out here, and that’s where he must have hidden the rest of the paintings, and he told you exactly where before he died. So it all added up – you must have gone to Carrara to get them. I want those paintings now.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, O’Higgins. I didn’t come here to find those paintings, because my father didn’t tell me where they were, and I did just come here to renew happy memories. So why don’t you just bugger off and leave us to enjoy them?’
‘Ah, Mr Contini.’ He was sympathetic. ‘Of course I’ll let the two of you go your own way with your happy memories.’ Then his eyes narrowed. ‘But not until you tell me where those pictures are.
‘I see.’
‘I hope you do. I hope you’re going to be sensible this time. Where are the rest of those pictures?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Come, it’s a big area, forty square miles of marble mountains, they tell me. Clearly I can’t take a needle-in-a-haystack approach. You’ll have to help me. Otherwise my friends here,’ he gestured to the men behind him, ‘will take a very unwelcome interest in you, particularly in your girlfriend.’
I looked at Ben. We were surely and finally cornered now. He saw this, too.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where they are, but I’ll help you, tell you all I know.’
‘Good. Meanwhile you’ll stay in your rooms, with my friends here keeping an eye on you. I have things to see to at the marina. We’ll meet at lunch – just you and me. And please don’t make a fuss, or you’ll ruin everything. Including yourselves.’
I looked across at Ben. He looked at me. I said to him with my eyes, ‘Get us out of this one, Ben, and forgive me for ever questioning your crazy idiot schemes. Dear Ben, just get us out of this one.’
