Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  Though on the cusp of fifty when Celia met him, he has never been married. Elisabetta, giving Celia some background to the man, paused after disclosing this fact, before proceeding to make her meaning explicit. For Celia, however, Mauro’s sustained avoidance of matrimony was not in itself to be taken as evidence of suspect character – on the contrary, she was inclined to take it as a sign that this was a man who said Yes to life. People who were not well disposed towards Mauro (and there were several of these, Elisabetta intimated) might describe him as something of a playboy – a ‘little playboy’. Big playboys pick up models and starlets in Milan and Paris and New York; Mauro picked up his women wherever he could find them. ‘They could be anybody,’ said Elisabetta, raising her eyes skyward. Last summer he’d had a fling with some girl who worked on the perfume counter at La Primavera. ‘She wasn’t good-looking, she wasn’t clever. So who knows why?’ wondered Elisabetta, with an expression that said she couldn’t bring herself to think too closely about the basis of the shop girl’s attraction. ‘He likes them young?’ Celia suggsted – but no, this wasn’t the case. From the perfume girl he had moved on, more or less directly, to a German woman who might even have been older than him (she certainly looked it); she lived in Vicchio, where she’d been making ugly pottery for the last twenty years. ‘They could be anybody,’ Elisabetta repeated. There was perhaps a portion of warning in this, but Elisabetta would have found it almost impossible to imagine that her friend could have any interest in man who, for all his undeniable (if facile) charm, was a classic case of arrested development. She respected Celia as a woman who could never, merely for the sake of company or sex, tolerate a man who was not up to the mark.

  In fact, Celia had enjoyed several evanescent relationships with men who, in one way or another, were very much not up to the mark, but she had revealed to Elisabetta only those affairs that she knew would not have a detrimental effect on Elisabetta’s estimation of her. (Elisabetta was never to know about the dalliance with Mauro – who, intuiting that Elisabetta was not an admirer (she saw him as being just one rung up the social scale from a bricklayer, he said), was quite happy to comply with Celia’s request that they keep their relationship a secret.) To Elisabetta’s knowledge, the roll-call of Celia’s romantic involvements in the previous two years featured only two liaisons: the first with a man from the Feltrinelli bookshop, who was one day going to write the definitive study of Freemasonry in Italy (a project of which no more than five hundred words materialised in the months that Celia was with him); and the second with an employee of the science museum, whose unhappiness at the gulf between what he had become and what he had once dreamed of becoming (if not quite a second Enrico Fermi, then at least a professor), grew steadily more oppressive until it achieved an unbearable weight in the immediate aftermath of his fortieth birthday, an event which was about as much fun as a funeral. These were serious relationships with serious people, which had foundered because – as far as Elisabetta could see – the men had failed to keep Celia mentally engaged. If two intelligent individuals such as these could be found wanting, a gadfly such as Mauro would bore her from the outset, thought Elisabetta.

  But the man from the bookshop and the man from the museum hadn’t failed to stimulate Celia’s mind. Every week, right up to the end of each affair, she had learned things from them. The problem had been that, though each was gentle and affectionate and in his own way interesting, they had allowed themselves to become torpid. One had, by his own admission, more or less given up; the other simply hadn’t got round to admitting that he had given up. From the sound of him, Mauro was not a torpid individual. It might be that he was indeed the slave of an undiscriminating libido, but the variety of his lovers was in itself no proof of this. She knew nothing about the girl from the perfume counter, and would not dismiss her automatically as just another drone of the retail hive. She knew nothing of the middle-aged German potter, but it might be counted to the favour of a man who could still attract young secretaries that he should choose to have an affair with a woman to whose sexual allure many other men in his position (charming, with money) might have been blind. The brute statistics of one’s bedroom activities, as she knew from her own experience, were not in themselves sufficient proof of sexual incontinence.

  Elisabetta’s debriefing was delivered in advance of a party given in a villa near Fiesole, by a relative of Mr Mascarucci, whose family had once had some sort of business dealings with Mauro. Sitting with her friend in a quiet corner of the garden, Elisabetta pointed out the notorious ladies’ man. He stood in profile to them, and profile was not his best angle, what with the doughy midriff and the lack of definition in the chin area. He had rolled up his sleeves, revealing deeply tanned arms and a watch with a thick gold bracelet; his hair, thinned to a few strands on top, was glued to his scalp with oil. He looked, thought Celia, like someone you might see in the background of a casino scene in a James Bond film. The two middle-aged women to whom he was talking, though, seemed to be finding his conversation delightful. On the other hand, as Celia noted when she surveyed the garden, almost everybody seemed to be having a delightful conversation. (Whereas she and Elisabetta had sought each other out, having escaped from the tedium of, respectively, a retired optometrist and a dolt who knew more about recent developments in the science of road-traffic management than any other man in Tuscany.) Elisabetta was borne away by the host to meet someone who had just arrived; soon after, Celia met Mauro. In taking a glass of prosecco from the huge rustic table on which the food and drink had been arrayed, Celia snagged the hem of her dress on the leg of a similarly rough-hewn chair. No sooner had she felt the tug than Mauro was there, detaching the fabric from the splinter so quickly and so precisely that not the slightest rip was suffered. The gallant intervention was more than impressively swift and skilful: it was executed with perfect impersonality, as if the dress had been merely a decorative banner hanging on a pole. Damage prevented, Mauro gave her a perfunctory little smile and turned to resume the conversation from which he’d been distracted by her mishap – a mishap he could have observed only, of course, if he’d had his eye on her, as Celia later realised.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Elisabetta predicted, but he wasn’t. Several times, in the course of the evening, Celia and Mauro crossed paths, and he acknowledged her with a nod that was no more than courteous. It was past midnight and she had decided it was time to go home when, taking her leave of yet another stupefyingly unfascinating man (an earnest believer in the wisdom of the Tarot), she turned to find herself face to face with Mauro, who was in retreat from a man whom he was promising to call the next day. Stepping aside to let her pass, he gave her a look that was wry and weary, and seemed to say that he’d had enough of socialising for one night, almost. ‘Buona notte,’ said Celia. ‘Good night,’ replied Mauro. Then Celia said ‘Thank you’; and Mauro said ‘For what?’; and then they were talking.

  They talked, in English, for half an hour or so, chiefly about Celia’s work and her experience of living in Italy. He found out that she had lived in Bologna; they talked about restaurants in Bologna – his favourite was a place she’d never heard of, somewhere out in the suburbs. A promising young chef would shortly be opening a restaurant in Florence, Mauro informed her, and for a second she thought that he was preparing an invitation to go there with him, but the subject was immediately discarded. He wanted to know more about what she thought of Florence, how she’d come to be here, et cetera, et cetera. As soon as she had answered one of his questions he had another ready, but his curiosity seemed genuine and disinterested; his gaze, though steadily direct, was cool. Conscious of having ceded control of the conversation, Celia tried to divert it onto the topic of Mauro’s business. ‘That’s not interesting,’ he said, and steered them straight back to Celia’s profession. A friend of his, a software engineer, had a name for a particular kind of technical Italian verbiage – ‘smokeware’. With this word, delivered deadpan, in a voice that could have been formed in an Eng
lish public school, and with eyes that widened in a way that was suggestive of a sardonic sense of humour, she had an intimation of the efficacy of Mauro’s charm. She complimented him on the excellence of his English, and felt a twitch of annoyance for having done so, as if she’d broken a promise to herself. For many years, he said, he’d been a devotee (the very noun he used) of the BBC World Service. ‘Crewe Alexandra’ he intoned, by way of demonstration of his best BBC delivery. At this point Celia became aware that Elisabetta was standing by the table, waving her car keys at her enquiringly. ‘You must go,’ said Mauro, with no shade of disappointment. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘Ditto,’ answered Celia. ‘Ditto,’ Mauro repeated, as if this were an amusing new word to learn. She took the offered hand: the skin was remarkably soft, and his handshake was not an act of self-assertion. Neither did he maintain the contact for too long, or treat her hand like an object of extraordinary delicacy, as men on the make so often did.

  ‘He knows where you work? He’ll call, just wait,’ said Elisabetta. He didn’t call, and Celia didn’t wait. From time to time she remembered with amusement ‘Crewe Alexandra’, but not often. One or two men were on her mind, and Mauro was not one of them. Then, three or four months after the gathering in the villa, she and Elisabetta were invited to a party to mark the opening of Mauro’s latest venture: a holiday complex of which he was the part-owner, comprising apartments, a spa, a fitness centre, a restaurant, a nine-hole golf course and a multitude of other leisure facilities, constructed on the site of a long-abandoned farm up in the Mugello. On arrival she spotted him at once, chatting to a bunch of well-groomed senior citizens beside the outdoor pool. He glanced her way and raised a hand, as you might acknowledge someone you didn’t feel any great desire or need to talk to. After giving a speech from the steps of the restaurant, he went into the building, and during the next hour or so she glimpsed him twice: laughing uproariously with one of the senior citizens, and looking rather solemn as he strolled across the lawn beside a tall and shockingly beautiful young woman who was perhaps half his age. Fireworks were lit, and as an immense silver chrysanthemum lit up the hills suddenly Mauro was at her shoulder, as though to resume a conversation that had been interrupted only a few minutes earlier. ‘Last year I was at a fiesta in Spain,’ he said, ‘and there was a man running about with fireworks on his body. All over his body. A suit of fireworks, and he was running through the crowd with flames everywhere. Crazy people, like you say. I like crazy people.’ Celia, having no recollection of having said anything about crazy Spaniards, had to be reminded that she’d told him, in the garden of the villa, about seeing men jumping from one moving car to another, after Barcelona had beaten Real Madrid. It became apparent, in the next few minutes, that Mauro had remembered everything she’d told him about herself, about her family, her job, the places she’d lived.

  ‘So this is my business,’ he said, with a gesture that was not immodest, as if inviting her opinion not of something that he had played a part in bringing into existence, but rather of a place where he just happened to work. ‘It’s impressive,’ said Celia, though she’d never contemplate staying in a place like this, which perhaps – judging by his momentary quarter-grin – Mauro understood. The farm had been going to ruin for a long time, he told her. An old man lived alone here for years, barely managing to grow enough to live on. Where the swimming pool was – that had been a vegetable garden, so overgrown that it was impossible to walk across it. In the farmhouse, one of the rooms downstairs was a metre deep in garlic, and they’d found a mummified kitten under straw in one of the bedrooms. Every roof and floor had to be rebuilt, but the stone walls were sound, mostly, and there was plenty of land. ‘And of course the big thing, the biggest thing,’ Mauro declared, offering her the panorama, ‘is where it is. It is here.’

  With a deep satisfaction, he surveyed the darkening hills. ‘You have been here before, in this area?’ he asked. Celia confessed that she had not. Mauro nodded, as if she had confirmed what he had suspected. If a gunman ran amok in a Chianti village tonight and sprayed the piazza with bullets, he said, he’d hit more British people and Germans and Dutch than Italians. ‘But here it is different. Here he could hit some Florentines, maybe. Otherwise, people who live here.’ After a pause to admire the landscape, Celia commented that if the gunman were to wait until next month he might hit some tourists who were staying here. Mauro looked at her; it was impossible to tell if offence had been taken until he replied, as though answering an observation of great weight: ‘Yes, it is a difficult problem. We want people to see that this is beautiful. But people come, and they make it less beautiful. It is a conundrum.’ It was all a matter of balance, he told her. Balance had to be the guiding principle – a balance of the natural and the fabricated, of the old and the new. (One can read more about the importance of the concept of balance to Mauro’s enterprise on its website. The philosophy addresses the whole person – mind, body and soul. Recognising the physical, the mental and the spiritual, it works towards their equilibrium. A philosophy of balance; between exercise and relaxation; between conventional [sic] and innovation.) There was an element of sales-talk here, but the promotional material was not overdone, and when Mauro, surveying the hills, repeated that the issue was complicated, his expression of thoughtfulness was more than plausible. ‘We want to make money, of course. We are in business,’ he stated. ‘But we don’t want things to change too much. Things must not change too much. We have to be respectful. We make a mark, but it must be a small mark.’

  Months later, recalling this little speech, she found it hard to believe that she hadn’t found it bogus. Had it been delivered inside the building, to an audience of twenty, perhaps she would have done, but out on the terrace, in the warm dusk, under a sky thickly veined with gold and indigo, she heard it differently. Below the terrace a slope of grass descended to a stand of chestnut trees. The trees screened a small pool: ‘for looking, not for swimming,’ Mauro explained. ‘It is special, isn’t it?’ he said, as if he knew that some people wouldn’t be able to see that it was, but was certain that Celia would not be one of them. She nodded. Mauro, gratified, nodded back, and for a minute they leaned on the balustrade, a yard or so apart, not talking, just looking at the hills. Violet shadows were filling the slopes; scraps of mist or smoke hung in the hollows; the lights of isolated houses were like the lights of fishing boats on the sea. Pointing to a small cluster in the distance, Mauro told her: ‘I was born there.’ His grandmother and grandfather still lived in the village; they were both in their nineties and had never been further than Florence. Did the English language, Mauro asked, have an equivalent to the word campanilismo? Celia thought not: ‘We have parochialism instead,’ she said. ‘That is because we are a young country,’ said Mauro, and they talked about this idea for a while, until Mauro, looking at his watch, said that there were some people he had to be nice to.

  They walked together back towards the main building, and by the pool they came upon the beautiful tall girl. Mauro introduced her to Celia: ‘Laura, my niece.’ On the other side of the pool a man beckoned to Mauro. ‘I must go,’ he apologised to Laura and Celia. That evening Celia was wearing a dress that Elisabetta had found for her. Made of silk (pale eau de Nil – her moonlight dress, Mauro would call it), it fell in a low soft scoop at the back, to the base of her shoulder blades. Turning away, Mauro placed – as if absent-mindedly – the tip of an index finger (cooled by the chilled wine) very lightly on her back, midway between her neck and the swag of silk, and he left it there for half a second. The contact was startling, says Celia. It was like having her Standby button pressed.

  The relationship with Mauro lasted approximately five months – or, to put it another way, somewhere between twenty and forty days. Mauro had a lot of projects in progress at the same time. He was busy making his small marks all over Italy, in zones characterised by Celia as medium-wild: the Apennine foothills of eastern Umbria, the higher reaches of Marche, and so on. Almost every da
y he would phone her, and towards the end of the week he would ask: ‘Are you free?’ During this period of her life Celia was nearly always free at the weekend. Once or twice she felt that she should tell him that unfortunately she wouldn’t be free, to prevent the affair from appearing too blatantly lopsided, but she never did. Sometimes they’d spend the whole weekend together; sometimes Mauro had to be elsewhere on the Saturday or the Sunday, appraising yet another investment opportunity. He didn’t enquire too closely about what she might be doing in the week ahead, and she was satisfied with whatever information he might volunteer with regard to his own movements – which was generally little more than a recitation of his business diary. There was no planning in this relationship: planning was something that Mauro confined to the commercial sphere. Marriage was repellent to him, he once told her, because the heart could not be contracted. Celia was of course broadly in agreement, but nonetheless, in an ideal world, she would have preferred a slightly lower quotient of uncertainty than there was in this affair. Occasionally she’d call him early in the week to suggest an escapade for the coming weekend or the one after that. These initiatives were rarely successful, because in Mauro’s line of work there was no knowing what action might, with little warning, be demanded of him in order to keep a scheme alive – there might be builders to chivvy, lawyers to consult, architects to chase. He was, however, a diligent phoner. He’d ring as often as three times in a single day: from restaurants in the middle of nowhere, from hilltops and empty village squares, and once in a while – always late at night – from his office in Florence. ‘Come over,’ Celia would say when he rang from the office, before she’d learned that for Mauro the office day went on until he was too tired to type his name, let alone perform sex to the required standard. By this we mean the standard that Mauro required of himself, and this was a very high standard indeed, Celia attests.