And here, as Celia herself once came close to admitting, I believe we arrive at the essence of the thing with Mauro. When she thought about it afterwards, she’d known in the moment he shook her hand at the villa party that this was a man who was tremendously good in bed. The basis of Mauro’s virtuosity was neither singular equipment nor superhuman stamina: it was, rather, a matter of what one might crudely define as technique. ‘Technique’, however, has connotations of practice and self-conscious execution, whereas what was remarkable about Mauro was that he never seemed to be bringing into play a repertoire of arousal, but was instead ever-responsive, often to signals of which Celia herself was unaware. He was an infallible reader of her body, and the most generous and delicate of lovers (‘a male lesbian,’ she called him), without any of the self-regard of those boyfriends who had esteemed themselves as sensitive lovers, and displayed their sensitivity by caressing the curves of desired flesh as if moulding a body out of clay.
Let us not linger on this topic. It suffices to record that several intensely pleasurable days were spent with Mauro in a variety of bolt-holes, mostly in obscure corners of Tuscany (there are such corners, Celia assures me), but with excursions into the medium-wilds of other provinces, on those occasions when Mauro thought that the necessities of business could be dealt with swiftly, leaving enough free time to make the trip worthwhile for his lover. To the latter category belongs an unforgettable weekend in a ramshackle old inn not far from Macerata, where the bedroom commanded a view of half of central Italy and was lit up by the most amazing sunset she has ever seen, and the wizened old lady who ruled the kitchen produced a plate of truffle pasta that had Mauro inhaling the sweetly mouldy steam in a daze of contentment; the truffle, he said, was the earth’s alchemy. Terrific food – generally eaten in modest backwater restaurants where the boss greeted Mauro like a member of the family – was another major pleasure of weekends with Mauro. A dose of nature was generally on the agenda too. They walked in the fragrant woods of the Casentino and gulped the cold winds of the Sibillini mountains. At daybreak they bathed in hot sulphur pools, in the open air. Mauro was a veritable emperor of the senses.
Five months after the affair had begun it ended, and it ended where it had begun. Walking back up the grassy slope from the Pool for Looking, Celia glanced up and saw, through the window of the restaurant, Mauro raising his hand from the shoulder of the young woman from the reception desk, and the young woman – seeing Celia – pulling back in a way that permitted only one interpretation. ‘I made no promises,’ Mauro pointed out, and this was true, in the sense that no avowals of fidelity had been made. ‘I like her, I like you more,’ he explained. Celia was surprised to find that she wasn’t greatly upset: it was as if an enjoyable holiday had finished, that was all. Mauro saw no reason why they should not carry on seeing each other: ‘I am the same person I was and you are the same person too, no?’ When Celia replied that, all things considered, she would rather they stopped sleeping with each other, he accepted her decision instantly, with equanimity. Celia was disappointed rather than shocked: disappointed that Mauro should have strayed so soon, and that the denouement should be so banal. But she had known that this would not be a durable relationship. It was never possible that she would fall in love with Mauro. No pain was suffered: a punch to her pride was the only damage, and her recovery was rapid. There was a period of self-analysis, of sorts. She affected to envy Charlie the stability of what she took to be his passionless marriage (The Alliance, she called it). Life would be so much simpler if she could learn to place a higher value on companionship, but the problem was that she liked sex too much. She announced that, in order to take stock of her life, a period of celibacy was in order. This self-denying ordinance was in effect for a month or two, until Stefano came along.
We have time for Stefano, I am very glad to say. Crossing Piazza Santissima Annunziata on a Saturday afternoon, Celia was asked if she’d care to sign a petition on behalf of some environmental pressure group. The question was put to her by Stefano Agazzi, who was as many years younger than Celia as Mauro was older, and in many respects his antithesis: sartorially (severely eroded sweater; jeans that looked as if they might not survive the next wash, which was long overdue); bodily (lean as a high jumper; handsome in a somewhat Scandinavian mode; the hair hay-coloured, the eyes blue); temperamentally (perpetually worried by Big Issues; could happily subsist on a diet of water and pizza); economically (working as a waiter). In retrospect, the fling with Stefano came to seem the less comprehensible of these two short-burn romances. Undeniably the boy was good-looking, which is never a bad thing. Vanity was also a factor: it was pleasant to be pursued by so personable a young man. And she really was pursued.
As she recalls, the conversation at the makeshift table on Piazza Santissima Annunziata did not amount to much more than an exchange of platitudes on the lamentable state of the planet, but it had a remarkable effect on Stefano: two or three minutes after saying goodbye to him, she heard a running footfall and turned to see him sprinting towards her down Via Cavour. He told her how much he wanted to continue their discussion; with the humility of an autograph hunter he asked for her phone number; failing to obtain it, he said he’d be collecting signatures over at Santo Spirito the next day, so maybe if she was in the area she could say hello and, who knows, perhaps they could have a coffee? Maybe, replied Celia, at which Stefano thanked her and bowed, with hands flattened together and raised to his nose as if (as it later struck Celia) he were taking his leave of a nun. She should, she came to think, have taken this fulsome show of respect as a warning, instead of allowing herself to be flattered. In the case of Mauro, she had been the one to whom things were offered, and she had decided to take them; with Stefano the situation was reversed – he was a supplicant, and perhaps, initially, in the aftermath of Mauro, this was an element of Stefano’s appeal.
Very soon, though, the lad’s respect became oppressive. As Stefano let Celia know, barely five minutes after they’d sat down in the café on Piazza Santo Spirito, he didn’t have much time for ‘girls’: they knew nothing about life. Celia was very much a woman (or, as he put it, she was ‘very woman’), and he had sensed a connection with her right away – nothing as vulgar as a spark of sexual attraction, more an aura of affinity. Stefano was a very serious boy, and was extremely angry about the state of the world. Perhaps talking to him re-awakened the student in Celia. He excoriated the super-rich and berated the multinationals that traded with themselves to minimise tax, paying huge fees to consultancy firms that existed only on paper, selling plastic buckets for a thousand dollars while rocket launchers were sold to criminals for next to nothing. His fury was directed at the tabletop, from which he would glance up to meet her gaze for a fraction of a second and ask: ‘What do you think?’ Celia made some hackneyed observations on Third World debt, to which Stefano attended as if she were releasing the precious distillate of her superior experience. What Celia thought about such matters did appear to be what interested him most; they were together for an hour, and in all that time just about the only personal information he extracted from her was that she was a language teacher. This was intriguing – a young and good-looking Italian male for whom sex did not appear to be the top priority. He was working that evening, so had to leave at six-thirty. ‘Could I see you again?’ he asked, as one might ask an analyst if there might be any chance of another appointment.
One afternoon in the middle of the following week they walked right across Florence, from Sant’ Ambrogio to the Cascine park, then over the river to the Santo Spirito café. Walk, talk and drink coffee – that’s all they did, and it seemed that Stefano was perfectly content with this. Again, they talked little about themselves: on this occasion, the city was the principal topic, and Celia had never met anyone who knew so much about Florence. He had a multitude of stories about lunatic artists, feuding merchants, maniacal priests, murderers. He confessed to often feeling sorry that he hadn’t been born into Dante’s world; mode
rn life, he thought, was a disaster. At the café they once again parted: Stefano went off to his restaurant, Celia to her class. They exchanged cheek-kisses and agreed that, weather permitting, on Sunday they’d take a walk out of town, through Arcetri and Santa Margherita a Montici.
Sunday proved to a beautiful day. In the shadow-dappled lanes the conversation took an autobiographical turn, but still Celia was not sure what was happening: was this an oddly diffident courtship, or a peculiar friendship? You could have ridden a motorbike through the space that Stefano maintained between them as they walked, and there were moments when, stopping to take in the view or inspect a specimen of local flora, he seemed to forget that she was there. They returned to Florence via San Miniato al Monte, where Celia told him about the time she’d sat here with Maria, and Stefano related an incident that occurred here during the siege of Florence by the army of Charles V (1530). At the crux of this narrative he broke off in mid-sentence. ‘I find you so very attractive,’ he said, as if this were something he had to confess in order to be able to continue with his story about the siege of Florence, which he did, and when he reached the end of the story he leaned over and kissed her. Not since she was a schoolgirl had she been the recipient of so strange a kiss: his tongue, rigid and hesitant, was like a mouse repeatedly peeking out from a hole in the skirting board to ascertain the whereabouts of the cat. That night, nevertheless, he went from the restaurant to Celia’s flat.
And here again Stefano can be seen as the converse of his predecessor. Sex for Stefano was very much about ‘making love’, and making love was a ritual that was not to be celebrated lightly. Sex was the embodied conjunction of souls, a revelation of essences. Seeing her naked for the first time, he reacted as though he were beholding her clad in heavenly raiment, and when he touched her it was as if he imagined the slightest pressure might bruise her innards. Now, our Celia is as capable as the next woman of appreciating a delicate dose of spiritualised eroticism, as long as it’s interspersed with a fair amount of common-or-garden unsacramental fucking. And yet, though as a lover Stefano was hopeless, he was tenderly hopeless, and there was no point in trying to make him otherwise, because she could no more make him less fey in bed than she could get him to renounce his political principles. He was an extremely likeable and intelligent person. Their walks and talks for a while continued to provide enough sustenance for the relationship. (Celia did her best to minimise the sexual activity, which Stefano didn’t seem to mind. Most nights they slept apart.) In her weeks with Stefano she learned a lot. She could no longer walk down certain streets in Florence without thinking of images that Stefano had put in her mind: an assassin galloping past the cathedral, a child stranded on a lump of stone in mid-river, a body carried in a torchlight procession to the church of Santa Croce.
Very soon, however, walking with Stefano had become too much of a history lesson; the silences between them grew thicker; he was too earnest, too eager, too young. Sensing, perhaps, that she might soon be gone, he took her to meet his mother. (The father worked in the airline industry and spent half his life in the air.) Meeting Mrs Agazzi had the effect of accelerating Celia’s departure: it was clear within minutes that she didn’t approve of her son’s too-mature lover (‘I’d lured her boy into my elfin grot – that’s how she saw it’), and Celia for her part wasn’t much taken with Signora Agazzi – a wiry, tight-mouthed little woman whose relationship with Stefano was altogether too clammy for Celia’s liking.
Celia’s next rendezvous with Stefano was the last. ‘My mother liked you,’ he remarked. ‘She thinks I’m not right for you,’ said Celia. He disagreed: ‘She takes time to warm to new people.’ (The kiss that Celia had received from Mrs Agazzi on leaving was so very far from warm, it was like being pecked by a feeble emu.) ‘But I don’t disagree with her,’ said Celia. ‘I’m not right for you.’ Stefano endeavoured to demonstrate, with reference to various shared interests, that – on the contrary – she was perfectly right for him. His hands manoeuvred imaginary shapes in the air, as if he were discussing two geometrical forms which, when turned through certain angles, locked smoothly together. ‘No, Stefano,’ she interrupted, ‘I am not right for you. You are not right for me and I am not right for you. It has been fun, and I like you very much, but we have come to the end.’ Stefano had problems with the word ‘fun’: ‘This is not about fun. Fun is for children.’ Well in that case, Celia replied, attempting to lighten the mood, she was maybe both too old and too young for him. This, to Stefano, was sophistry. He returned to his demonstration of their complicated compatibility; he insisted that there was a lot more they had to talk about. ‘We must meet again. Here, tomorrow,’ he suggested. Celia told him that she didn’t have anything more to say. ‘I will be here, tomorrow, this time,’ he said. Celia was not there the next day. A few weeks later, on the Santa Trìnita bridge, she saw Stefano coming towards her, talking intensely to a handsome forty-ish woman who appeared to be having some difficulty in understanding what he was saying; Celia smiled at him, and Stefano looked right through her.
The affairs with Stefano and Mauro, brief though they were, were by no means the most unsatisfactory of her Italian adventures. That distinction must be accorded to Mr Nevola, with whom we shall quickly dispense. Gianluca Nevola was her first lover (not quite le mot juste, in this context) after the split from photographer Matt. Disorientation in the wake of that separation might be seen as the chief explanation for this lapse. Compassion was also at work: the kindly and highly cultured Gianluca Nevola, a colleague at the school in Lucca, had lost his son three years before Celia met him, and there wasn’t a single hour of the day, he told her, that he didn’t think of him. A few days after his sixteenth birthday, Alessandro Nevola had been killed in a crash on the outskirts of the city. Gianluca had been driving the car. A van had suddenly pulled out of the line of traffic coming towards them, but there wasn’t enough room for it to overtake and Gianluca had been forced to take evasive action; the car had flipped over and gone into a lamp-post, on Alessandro’s side. Deranged by grief, Gianluca was unable to work for months, and when at last he re-emerged, he was subject to fits of rage that were unlike anything he had ever experienced. He found out that the man who had killed his son had moved to Arezzo; Gianluca tracked him down, and one day, having bought a hunting knife, he drove to the street in which the driver was now living, where he sat all afternoon, knife in hand, waiting for the man to come out of his apartment. When at last the man appeared, Gianluca was paralysed by hatred and a sense of the pointlessness of what he had been about to do; he stabbed the dashboard over and over again – which meant he had to take the car to the garage right away, because he couldn’t tell his wife what he’d done. She’d have thought it pathetic, which is what he thought himself.
While Gianluca was lost in mourning and then planning his revenge, his wife was walking every weekend to the road where the crash happened, to leave flowers. Three years on, she was still observing this ritual, with barely diminished regularity. She went to church, alone, three or four times a week. Gianluca told Celia that nowadays his wife talked to the priests more than she talked to him. His wife said she didn’t blame him for what had happened, but she did. He had turned the car over and Alessandro had died, whereas he had been merely scratched. Gianluca knew that, whatever she said, she thought that a better man would have sacrificed himself rather than let his son die. Some evenings Gianluca so dreaded the idea of going home that he’d stay late in the staff room, preparing the next day’s lessons, annotating superfluously his students’ work.
One night, passing a bar close to the school, Celia saw Gianluca inside and he at the same instant saw her. He was reading Ungaretti – his favourite poet, he said. She’d been warned by some of her colleagues that if you were alone with Mr Nevola for more than five minutes, he’d start talking about his son. She was alone with Mr Nevola for fifteen minutes, and he didn’t talk about his son – they talked about Ungaretti and about Lucca, where both the poet and Gianlu
ca had been born. When she left, he pressed her hand between his and thanked her; the next day, there was a volume of Ungaretti’s poems on her desk, with a card from Gianluca inside, thanking her for her company. The card marked the page of ‘Tu ti spezzasti’, which Celia read at her desk and liked, without knowing what it meant; it wasn’t much clearer after she’d read the notes at the back of the book, where she discovered that it commemorated the writer’s son, Antonietto. She and Gianluca fell into the habit, if Celia happened to have no other plans, of going for a drink after work on Wednesdays. He elucidated some of the complexities of Ungaretti (whose poems otherwise made little sense to her); from Ungaretti it was a natural progression to the subject of suffering and the overcoming of despair; he talked about Alessandro and his reaction to his death, and his wife’s reaction – but without emotion, as if they were case studies, to be analysed alongside that of Ungaretti. They usually had the one drink and parted after less than an hour; at the end of a two-drink session he apologised for being so morose and, on leaving, kissed her hand. Next time it was the other way round: Celia kissed Gianluca’s hand. He had beautiful hands – ‘Pianist’s hands,’ she told him. ‘I can’t play a note,’ he replied, and here a smile momentarily rejuvenated his face.
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